


all's fair in love (and war)

by singsongsung, stillscape



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, fic war!, more than one kind of AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-01-10 00:21:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 53,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12287304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung, https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: A blind dating app brought Veronica Lodge and Archie Andrews together. It also brought Veronica a new best friend. Is it so wrong for her to believe the perpetually single Betty ought to try the dating app too?Or: Veronica Lodge's life is an Audrey Hepburn rom-com. Betty Cooper's life spans a lot more genres (and for that matter, so does Jughead Jones's).





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [This post](http://stillscape.tumblr.com/post/165995666163/i-have-a-dumb-idea-fic-wars) went around tumblr. We (singsongsung/lessoleilscouchants and stillscape) decided to play. _How should we do this?_ we wondered. The post doesn't give many logistical instructions. 
> 
> We therefore recruited the wonderful Raptorlily to be our Switzerland. She assigned us a prompt and tropes. We drew virtual straws to pick who would go first. This is a very collaborative war, so we've been discussing a few details here and there, but we do not know the other person's trope. The main thing we decided is that stillscape is writing Betty's POV and singsongsung is writing Jughead's. Odd-numbered chapters will be stillscape's, even-numbered chapters will be singsongsung's. 
> 
> We hope you all enjoy this (possibly insane) journey. Please leave us a note and let us know what you thought!
> 
>  **Chapter 1 note:** I'm afraid Chuck Clayton is up to a very brief scene of no good towards a female character. His behavior is no worse here than it is on the show, but if you'd like to avoid it, just skip the bit after he leaves the party.

Ethel Muggs left the campus library shortly after 10:00 p.m., zipping up her jacket against the brisk October night. Stored in her phone was the number for Goldspire College’s “buddy system” service, but since the night still seemed young and her apartment was only a few blocks off campus, Ethel didn’t feel the need to call for a ride home. In fact, calling for a ride home didn’t even occur to her. She simply started walking. 

She was nearly home when, behind her, a branch cracked sharply as though someone had stepped on it. Ethel spun around, her heart racing—but there was no one behind her. A man walked on the other side of the street, a hoodie pulled over his bowed head, but he was too far away to have made that sound.

“Must have been a squirrel,” she told herself. 

She arrived at her building safely, without further incident.

  
  
  
  
  
  


A cork popped. 

“I must say, when I first downloaded that app, I thought I would _maybe_ have a good laugh,” Veronica said. “Who expects to actually meet someone on any kind of blind date, let alone one for which your date is selected by some sort of computer algorithm?” 

“No one,” Betty said honestly. 

“And yet …” Veronica sauntered from her kitchen, carrying their second bottle of perfectly chilled rosé in one hand and a perfectly curated cheese board in the other. Their second bottle of wine, and she wasn’t the slightest bit wobbly on her four-inch heels. “And yet, it brought me not one, but two special someones.” 

“How do you do that?” Betty asked, gesturing at Veronica’s ankles. Her new friend smiled. 

“Years of practice.”

Veronica set down the cheese board, then poured them each a fresh glass. 

“A toast,” she said solemnly, exchanging the bottle for her wineglass. “To Mystery Date, responsible not only for my new boyfriend, but my new _best_ friend.” 

Betty was not yet used to Veronica. Oh, she was used to Archie getting new girlfriends—that happened fairly regularly—but she wasn’t used to Archie’s new girlfriends making concerted efforts to become friends with _her_ , and she certainly wasn’t used to them doing so without an apparent ulterior motive. None of them had ever insisted on a spa day followed by a girls’ night in. Taking an entire day off from studying the week before midterms was making all of Betty’s guilt triggers kick into overdrive. But her therapist had been encouraging her to find a better work-life balance, so … here she was, a little bit drunk in Veronica’s apartment, with glowing skin and a fresh manicure. 

“Cheers,” Betty said. They clinked glasses. 

Veronica took a long sip, then lowered her glass and met Betty’s eyes. “Promise me this. No matter what happens between me and Archie, promise me you and I can still be friends.” 

“Of course. As long as you don’t break his heart.” 

“You’re already choosing him over me?” Veronica gasped, overdramatically. Both girls giggled. 

“I’ve known him longer,” Betty protested. “You can’t expect me to side against someone I’ve been friends with since, like, kindergarten. Unless it's his fault, of course.” 

“How completely reasonable of you.” 

“That’s me.” Betty tossed a grin across the room. “I’m a completely reasonable person.” 

Veronica gestured rather grandly at her entire body. “And I am not. We make a good team.” 

With that, both girls turned their attention to the cheese plate. 

“Okay, so I’ve been biting my tongue on this, but I have to ask,” Veronica said, a few minutes later. “How’s _your_ love life?” 

“Nonexistent.” When Veronica raised an eyebrow, she shrugged. “That’s the truth.” 

“Is that how you want it to be?”

“What do you mean?” 

“Because it’s totally cool if you don’t want to date, or hook up, or whatever,” Veronica said. “Or if you don’t want to tell me anything. I’m just a curious kitten.” She took another sip of wine, then sat up, folding her arms over her crossed legs. “So, do you want it to be nonexistent?” 

“I don’t know. Nonexistent is what I’m used to, anyway.” Even though she was drunk enough not to be _too_ embarrassed, Betty felt herself start to fade under Veronica’s intense attention. She let the tips of her fingers fold inwards, but she didn’t feel the need to dig her nails in—at least, not yet. “I never really dated in high school, either; I wasn’t girlfriend material. I guess I just never got in the habit.” 

Veronica pursed her lips slightly. “I find that hard to believe.” 

“What?” 

“That you weren’t girlfriend material.” 

Suddenly, Veronica’s apartment felt uncomfortably warm. She decided to blame it on the rosé. And if she was turning away from Veronica now, well, that was just because she needed to open the window. 

“I wasn’t,” she said, as she eased the window open and a delightfully cool breeze hit her skin. 

“You. Betty Cooper.” Veronica shook her head, sending her dark tresses cascading in a way that was simultaneously mad—like in the British, Alice in Wonderland sense—and elegant. “Dish. I need details.” She uncrossed her legs, leaned forward for the wine, and topped up both glasses, though neither had been emptied much since the last refill. 

Betty plopped back in her chair and picked up her glass, swirling the wine slightly, as though that was going to change her perception of how it tasted. It was not. Her palate wasn’t _nearly_ that sophisticated, especially not when they’d already gotten into a second bottle. 

The perfectly pink wine matched her perfectly pink sweater. She could have spilled the entire glass on herself, and no one would be able to tell it wasn’t just water. 

“Oh, you know.” She took a sip, and continued to stare through the walls of the wineglass. “I was probably exactly what you’re imagining; I haven’t changed much. I went through a pretty bad awkward phase that lasted most of freshman year, and then …” Shrugging, she took another sip of wine. 

“You emerged from your chrysalis as the total smoke show you are today?” 

More than a few drops of rosé landed on Betty’s sweater as she tried to keep from choking. Veronica handed her a cocktail napkin, and as she dabbed at herself, Betty realized she’d been right about the combination of wine and sweater—this was not going to stain. 

“No, I emerged as a goody-two-shoes girl next door with overprotective parents who did a million nerdy extracurricular activities, never made the cheerleading squad, and mostly only went to senior prom because she chaired the decorating committee.” 

Veronica arched a perfectly groomed eyebrow. “Please tell me you at least had a date to this senior prom you decorated.” 

“Sure,” Betty said, nodding. “I mean, kind of. I went with Jughead, but just as friends.” 

“No one goes to prom just as friends!”

“We did. Really. He didn’t even ask me. We were at lunch one day, me and him and Archie, and Archie was talking about _his_ date, and somehow by the end of lunch period Archie had decided the four of us were sharing a limo. It was fine. I had fun.” 

“That’s not how the high school story is supposed to end,” Veronica said. 

“Yeah, well, that is how it ended. And it’s not like—I mean, it was fine. I had a pretty good high school experience, overall. And I did go on a few dates.” 

Two. She had gone on two dates in high school, both in her junior year. Sophomore year saw the gradual waning of her longtime crush on Archie, but she’d never worked up much of a crush on anyone else. She had kissed one boy, although the kiss was unrelated to either of the dates she’d gone on. Jughead had accompanied her to senior prom, very platonically. And, well, that was that. They were sophomores in college now, and aside from a random makeout session at a party towards the end of last spring, her dating life was the same as it always had been, what she’d told Veronica it was: simply not there. 

“But you didn’t have a Romeo climb up to your balcony and sweep you off your feet?” Veronica sounded genuinely sad about it. Betty shook her head. 

“I mostly just felt kind of invisible.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The first time that Betty Cooper ever felt truly invisible was the eighth-grade class trip to Niagara Falls. The chaperoning had been minimal at best, and she’d arrived in the hotel room designated as party headquarters close behind her roommates for the trip. One of them, Midge Klump, had been desperate to play Spin the Bottle, but needed moral support—and so nervously, cautiously, Betty sat cross-legged on the floor and wondered whether she really wanted the bottle to land on her or not. 

And then it did … sort of. A boy spun the bottle, and it landed pointing exactly between Betty and the girl to her right. 

He picked the girl on her right. 

Another boy spun the bottle, and it landed pointing exactly between Betty and the girl on her left. This boy picked the girl on her left. 

When this happened a third time, and the boy in question picked a girl who was standing behind Betty—not even playing—she pushed back from the circle and excused herself, muttering something about needing to use the restroom. 

No one seemed particularly sad to see her go.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Melody Valentine typically didn’t have much time for dating, but she did have eyes—so when she noticed Goldspire’s first-string quarterback paying a little too much attention to her during their English seminar, she thought _I can work with that_. Even though Goldspire was a Division III school, and football wasn’t a huge deal, she knew he had a bit of a reputation as a BMOC. Why shouldn’t he? Division III athletics were still athletics. By Division III standards, the Goldspire Maple Leafs were pretty good. And Chuck Clayton was, by _anyone’s_ standards, a very attractive man. 

She ran into him at an off-campus party the weekend after she’d noticed him checking her out. He checked her out again. She returned the favor. 

They left together. 

She knew she didn’t know Chuck very well, but her roommate Valerie had already left with her own boyfriend, and Melody figured she’d rather be headed home with a guy she sort of knew than with no one at all. Especially if the guy was one she’d _like_ to get to know better—possibly even in the biblical sense, or something close to it. 

Chuck threw an arm around her shoulder as they walked. The heaviness of it made Melody a little uncomfortable, but when she said as much, Chuck merely laughed. He did not move his arm. In fact, he pulled her a little closer. 

Her pulse quickened, and not in a good way. On top of Chuck getting a little too up in her personal space without invitation, she was starting to think she heard someone following them. But when she turned her head, no one was there. 

“Relax, baby,” Chuck said. He’d taken his own survey of the situation, realized they were completely alone, and let his hand drop to Melody’s breast. 

“Okay, no,” she said, pushing at it. “Not before I say so.” 

But Chuck was much larger and stronger than she was, and her struggle was for naught. Melody’s heart plummeted. 

“Chuck.” 

Chuck opened his mouth, but instead of words, the only sound Melody heard was a piercingly loud whistle. This, thank god, inspired Chuck to remove his hands from Melody and cover his ears instead. Melody took advantage of his slight distraction and sprinted away, knowing she probably wouldn’t get very far if he chose to pursue her—he had longer legs, her party outfit was hardly tailored for running—but she had to try.

“What the hell, Melody?” she heard behind her, but she didn’t look back. 

She turned the first corner she came to, and ran bang into _another_ person she knew from her English class, one who’d apparently materialized from thin air. 

“Hi,” said Betty Cooper, taking in Melody’s expression. “Is everything okay?” 

Chuck rounded the corner after her. He wasn’t running, but he was definitely in pursuit. “I just want to talk, baby,” he called. 

“No means no,” Melody called back. 

“Come on,” Betty muttered, taking Melody by the elbow. “My car’s right around the corner. Where do you live? I’ll drive you home.” 

“You don’t have to…” Melody started, but Betty raised an eyebrow, and she nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Betty.” 

“Of course.” Betty’s voice had a slightly forced lightness to it. “Any time.” 

Only when she was safely inside her apartment, changed into pajamas, and sipping a cup of chamomile tea did Melody think to wonder who the hell had blown that rape whistle.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jughead raised an eyebrow when she took her usual seat next to him on Monday morning, and said “You look exhausted.” 

She shrugged. Coming from most people, she’d consider that an insult (or a sign she needed to try harder with her under-eye concealer), but she knew Jughead was merely observing with concern, not passing judgment on her appearance. Actually, she felt pretty good—especially now that she’d arrived to their English seminar and ascertained that Chuck Clayton had elected to skip today’s class. She’d thought he might. The athletics department took complaints regarding athlete misconduct _very_ seriously. 

She slid her eyes across the room to Melody Valentine, who glanced back at her, nodded, and mouthed _I’m okay_. That was a relief. Melody had been a little hesitant to file the complaint against Chuck—after all, nothing much had happened—but Betty had talked her into it, in the end. 

It was not the first time that Betty had helped someone file a complaint against a member of the football team. 

Betty turned back to Jughead. He had coffee, she realized, and she was a little bit envious of that fact. 

“Midterms,” she said. 

Jughead tilted his head at her. “Midterms haven’t started yet. And didn’t you spend all day Saturday getting pampered with Veronica?” 

“Ah, so she told you about that.” 

“She didn’t tell me so much as she spent a very long time at our apartment on Sunday loudly proclaiming your greatness to Archie, in between … other activities. I’m tempted to ask if she’s trying to date you.” 

Betty tried to pretend she didn’t find that particular bit of gossip embarrassing; even in absentia, Veronica continued to overwhelm her. “In addition to or instead of Archie?” 

“Definitely in addition to,” Jughead muttered, just as their professor called the class to attention. She shot him a sympathetic look, and he rolled his eyes.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The first time that Betty Cooper had literally become invisible, she was fourteen years old, crying silently to herself in a corner of the girls’ locker room after her miserable failure of a cheerleading audition. Sweaty as she was, she couldn’t bear the thought of showering in the locker room, in front of everyone—not when the other girls in there had witnessed her mortification, and not when she knew the Head Bitch in Charge herself was liable to walk through the doors at any moment. So she’d shoved her own clothes back on (noticing, with some degree of self-realized horror, that her jeans _were_ a little snug) and was tying her shoes when, lo and behold, the doors opened and her tormentors entered. 

_Please don’t come this way_ , Betty thought desperately, squeezing her eyes shut as though this would help. She knew it wouldn’t. Their footsteps came closer and closer, and now she was able to recognize several distinct voices. Among them was her sister, Polly. 

“What can I say? I’ve been trying to help her with the routine at home, but…” Polly’s voice trailed off, and Betty knew exactly what expression would be on her sister’s face—that fake smile she’d developed over the last year, as she’d begun spending more and more time with the in crowd. “I guess I should have thrown in some diet and exercise advice, too.” 

Peals of laughter echoed across the tiled floors. Betty stared at her own feet and thought _I want to disappear_. 

And, lo and behold, she _did_. Her shoes weren’t there anymore. Neither were her feet, or her legs. She waved her hands in front of her face, but her hands were gone too. Except—she could feel them. She could touch her legs; they felt totally normal. 

Her backpack was on the bench next to her. It was visible. She grabbed it, and suddenly it wasn’t visible anymore either. 

With a frantically pounding heart, Betty looked up and realized Polly and the others were coming right at her. Polly was looking right at her, in fact—or no. Polly was looking through her. 

Polly couldn’t see her either. 

Betty couldn’t think what else to do. She took off, taking the long way around the locker room so she wouldn’t accidentally run into anybody, and breathed a sigh of relief when she made it to the door. She sped down the hallway, darting between the few students still roaming the halls of Riverdale High (none of whom noticed her) and stopped running only when she was safely out of the school. 

She stopped running only because she tripped on her untied shoelace and wiped out completely in the gravel. 

“Uh … Betty?” she heard. A boy’s voice, familiar, but not Archie’s. Jughead, it was Jughead. “Are you okay?” 

Head whirling, wincing in pain, Betty got to her feet. Jughead, obviously, could see her. She glanced down and realized she could see herself, too. 

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.” 

Jughead leaned over to pick up her backpack and handed it to her. 

“Where were you?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, a little too quickly. 

“You just kind of came out of nowhere.” 

“Oh. Uh, the gym. Cheerleading tryouts.” 

He considered her for a moment. “I’m guessing you don’t want me to ask how they went.” 

Betty shook her head. “I definitely don’t.” 

Later that evening, after she’d picked all the gravel from the heels of her hands and debriefed with Kevin for an hour, she decided she was profoundly grateful that Jughead, of all people, had been the one to witness her emergence from nothingness into disaster, if that was what he in fact had seen. Jughead had always had a good sense of when to keep his mouth shut. 

Then she sat down at her vanity, looked straight at her reflection, and thought _I want to disappear_. 

The girl in the mirror vanished.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She left their seminar, waved goodbye to Jughead—he had another class right away, on the other side of campus—and immediately headed for the nearest coffee cart. 

There was a huge line. It figured. Still, she had a two-hour break in her schedule. While she waited in line, she pulled out her phone and started scrolling through Instagram. It was what people did. 

It was what she did right up until the phone was snatched from her hand by none other than the girl whose picture she’d just been looking at. 

“Did you download Mystery Date yet?” Veronica demanded, pressing the home button. 

“No, I did not,” Betty sighed. “Ronnie, I’m really not—I don’t have _time_ to date.” 

“Tsk, tsk.” Veronica gave the screen a few taps. “Find the right guy, you’ll make time. Here, give me your thumb.” 

“What?” 

Veronica had already grabbed Betty’s thumb and pressed it to the home button. “TouchID. And coffee’s on me today. What are you having?” 

The cart only supplied drip, so they didn’t have much of a choice. Betty and Veronica sat down at a nearby table with two full paper cups. Veronica handed the phone back. 

“I’m not going to force you to go on blind dates,” she said. “But hear me out, okay? We…” Veronica gestured around them. “Are in _college_. We’re free of our parents, which from what I’ve heard is particularly good news in your case. We’re free to explore and figure out who we want to be. And we’re free to have as much sex as we want.” 

“Veronica!” 

“Well, we are. And I don’t think you’re taking advantage of that fact.” 

Betty definitely wasn’t, but she said nothing. 

“So you don’t have to set up an account. If you do set up an account, you don’t have to go on any dates. But if you do set up an account and go on dates and you eventually marry the guy you’ve met—or gal, if that’s what you want—just promise me I can be your maid of honor.” 

Veronica’s eyes shone dark and bright, and Betty collapsed into a groan. 

“Yeah, okay. I can promise you that much.” 

“And I promise I will throw you the most epic bachelorette party in the history of bachelorette parties.” 

“That sounds like more of a threat than a promise,” Betty said. The likelihood of this dating app leading anywhere close to marriage was practically nil, though, so she nodded at her friend. “Okay, fine. You can help me set up a profile. But—” She gave Veronica her best warning look. “But I’m not guaranteeing I’ll go on any dates.” 

Veronica clapped her hands, squealing with glee, and Betty couldn’t help but smile back. 

Somehow, by the time Betty had to leave for her next class, she’d agreed to definitely go on at least one date.

  
  
  
  
  
  


With great power came great responsibility. It was the oldest cliché in the superhero book. But Betty didn’t think she was much of a superhero. She only had the one power, and after months of experimenting in her bedroom, she’d concluded that it wasn’t terribly powerful. The first thing she learned was how to turn her power off; since she already knew tripping and falling had something to do with it, it didn’t take long for Betty to realize that to make herself visible again, she only needed to cause herself a little bit of pain. Pinching herself worked, but when she realized her arms were getting covered in weird bruises, she’d moved to digging her fingernails into her palms instead. As long as she kept herself from breaking the skin, no one would ever know.

So really, all she could do was make herself invisible and visible at will. But since her power was so easily turned off, she had to be careful. If she tripped again, or stubbed her toe, or slammed her finger in a door, she’d lose her cover. 

She spent the rest of her high school years trying to work out how her powers could be used for good. Her mother often wished out loud for a fly on the wall whenever she was trying to dig up dirt for a potential exposé, but Betty only had to think a few steps ahead to realize information you begged, borrowed, or stole while invisible was not an acceptable journalistic source (not that she thought her mother would necessarily have _cared_ about that, but still). 

She couldn’t volunteer her skills to the police; they’d never hire a teenager, and if the evidence she gathered wasn’t even up to journalistic standards, it definitely wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law. Besides, apart from the bikers who sold weed down by the old drive-in movie theater, Riverdale had basically no crime. 

She could have written an amazing gossip column for the school paper, but it only took one time overhearing a very private conversation she definitely shouldn’t have overheard for Betty to realize she was not emotionally cut out to be a gossip columnist. 

The very private conversation was between Archie and the music teacher, Ms. Grundy. It was also less of a “conversation” and more of a “makeout session.” 

Things fell apart after that. Betty wrote the incident down in her journal, omitting the detail that she’d actually been in the room with them at the time. Two days later, she—along with Archie, Mr. Andrews, and a handful of other people—learned that her mother made a habit of reading her diary. The only good part of the whole experience was that it totally quashed any lingering romantic feelings she might have been harboring towards Archie. 

They were friends again in a couple of months. Archie never asked _how_ Betty had overheard his “conversation,” and to this day, she’d never volunteered the information. 

For the next three years, Betty only went invisible when she needed a break from her family. 

Then, during her college orientation week, someone had handed her a rape whistle and some statistics on campus sexual assault, and it struck her like a lightning bolt. 

She could use her powers for good after all, and the only real risk to her would be a little lost sleep.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Betty was alone in her dorm room that evening, studying for her economics exam, when her phone gave a little ding. She checked the screen, expecting to find a text; instead, she found an announcement from Mystery Date. _E, you have a match!_ cried the little text banner. 

She shot a glance at her door—it was cracked open, since she was the resident assistant on call, but no one was coming. Why she thought she needed privacy to look at a dating app on her phone, she had no idea. 

Mystery Date, being a blind date app, didn’t allow profile pictures, so when Betty clicked on the profile, she found herself looking at a cartoon emperor penguin. It didn’t show full names on the profiles (though she’d been assured no one’s profile ever went live until an actual person at the tech company had verified they weren’t a serial killer); until she met her mystery man in person, she would know him only as F. 

There were hardly any details. Veronica had insisted that this was a feature, not a bug (“What kind of a blind date is it if you go in with preconceived notions?!”) and so all she knew about F was that he was between 18 and 24, had dark hair, and was supposedly 92 percent compatible with her which, the app assured her, was an extremely high compatibility percentage.

Another bubble popped up.

_F: Huh. Didn’t think I’d get a match so quickly._

_F: Or at all, if we’re being honest._

Betty stared at her phone for a moment, then wrote back. 

_E: Yeah, me either._

_F: So, how’d you get into this?_

_E: My friend thinks I need to get out more. You?_

_F: Same._

This was extremely weird, Betty thought. Then again, she had nothing to lose. 

_E: I wonder which 8 percent of us isn’t compatible._

_F: My left foot_. 

She snorted. 

And then somehow, twenty minutes later, she realized she’d agreed to dinner on Saturday night.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Sorry you got stuck with me as your prom date,” Betty said. 

“Sorry you got stuck with me as _your_ prom date,” Jughead replied. He looked around the Pembrooke’s ballroom as they swayed. “This is fine, though, right? No regrets.” 

“None,” she agreed. “I’m glad you came, really—this is much more fun than being Archie and Nancy’s third wheel. And just think, we won’t have to wake up tomorrow morning hungover and wondering if we’ve just made terrible mistakes.” 

He took a step back and twirled her, completely inexpertly. “Can I say I don’t get it, though?” 

“Don’t get what?” 

“Why twenty guys weren’t lining up to ask you to come to this thing.” 

“Well,” she said, teasingly, “why weren’t you?” 

He rolled his eyes. “When have you ever known me to date?” 

“I haven’t.”

“Exactly.” 

“I could ask you the same question, though.” 

“Betts,” he said, his face deadly serious, “you literally just did.” 

“Juggie,” she groaned. “No, I didn't; I literally asked why you weren't lining up to ask me. But now I am going to flip it. Seriously, why didn’t you have twenty girls lining up to get you to be their prom date?” 

It was a reasonable question, she thought. Jughead was a good-looking guy. He was one of the smartest people in school. Yes, he was sarcastic; yes, he was often deliberately weird, and yes, he had worn his beanie to prom. But considering how small Riverdale’s dating pool was, Jughead really should have been on more girls’ lists. 

“I assume it has something to do with my sparkling personality,” he deadpanned. 

She tilted her head back, made a show of examining him critically. “You have kissed a girl, right? Or a guy? I actually don’t know which it is for you.” 

“Girls,” he said, shrugging a little. “And yes, I have.” That was all the information he would give her. 

Anyway, all of Betty’s mother’s warnings about watching where her date put his hands went completely unheeded—not because she was throwing caution to the wind, but because Jughead gave her no reason to need to heed them.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She arrived to the restaurant ten minutes early, her palms sweaty for no particular reason, and accepted a seat facing the door. She hung her purse from the back of her chair and took a red carnation out of it; this she put on the table, as agreed. 

Then she waited. After a few moments of fidgeting, she pulled out her phone. Ignoring the ten million texts from Veronica, she opened up a news article she’d been meaning to read, and was deeply engrossed in it when she heard a nervous “Uh … Betty?” 

It was a male voice. A familiar male voice. 

She looked up. There stood none other than Jughead Jones, a red carnation tucked in the buttonhole of his sport coat. 

“Well,” he said, glancing at the carnation on the table. “ _This_ is awkward.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


(to be continued...)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for hopping on this (somewhat absurd) ride with us! We hope you continue to enjoy it.

Jughead thought about it, once, thanks to a healthy dose of well-intentioned encouragement. 

Senior year, in Archie’s childhood bedroom, the homiest place he’d ever known, he finished groaning over his character’s death in a video game only to be met with the sound of his best friend’s voice, hushed in a way he’d learned to dread. 

Archie said, “ _Bro_ ,” and Jughead knew right away that he was about to be pitched an idea he wanted no part of. 

“Bro, you know,” Archie said, elbows on his knees, expression painfully earnest, “You’re basically taking Betty to prom.” 

With some effort, Jughead held in a sigh, and said, “No, I’m not. We’re just taking the same limo as you, because we’re all friends, and because neither of us wants to watch you and Nancy suck face all by ourselves.” 

Unoffended by this comment, Archie continued, “Okay, yeah, it started that way, but now you’re kind of her date, right? You’re not bringing anyone. She’s not bringing anyone. You’re going together, with me and Nance.”

“I’m not her date. If Betty wanted a date, she could do way better than me.”

“No, she couldn’t,” Archie said, loyal as a damn golden retriever. “Anyway, Nancy thinks you should match your tie to the colour of Betty's dress.” 

Gaping slightly, Jughead demanded, “You’ve talked about this with your girlfriend? Jesus, dude.” 

“She’s wearing like a light blue. Nance sent a picture; hang on.” He grabbed his phone. 

“Archie.” Jughead shook his head. The sigh he was holding in felt heavier than it had before, like a stone in his chest. “Quit it.” 

“Juggie, c’mon. Would it really be that bad?” Archie’s eyes were wide and imploring. “Like, Betty’s really pretty!” He began counting off things on his fingers. “She likes books; you like books. She’s basically the nicest person on the planet. She bakes _insanely_ good brownies. She - ”

Jughead elbowed him harder than mere playfulness would require and jerked his chin toward the game, which had rebooted and was ready for another round. “I owe you an ass-kicking. Let’s do this.” 

Archie gave up, then, thankfully, but the thought lingered with Jughead - perhaps it was Archie’s use of his old childish nickname; perhaps it was the fact that Archie’s points were all accurate, if simplistic; perhaps it was that he knew, even if it managed to escape Archie’s attention, that Betty was more than _really pretty_ , that she was some kind of doe-eyed, long-legged, whip-smart, film-noir heroine who’d somehow been born in a small town upstate. He’s not sure, to this day, what it was, but he considered it: Betty and Jughead, Jughead and Betty, her soft pinks against his dark greys, her smiles turned into secrets just for him. He thought about it, and just for a moment, the thought drifted toward _maybe_. 

But he couldn’t date Betty. He couldn’t date anyone. 

He did, however, buy a sky-blue tie for prom. 

 

 

 

“That… answers the question about our high level of compatibility, doesn’t it?” Betty asked, with just a hint of a nervous chuckle in her voice, wearing that make-nice smile of hers, the one that always looked so genuine on her face. “We’ve already proven that we’re compatible. I mean, as friends.” 

“Yeah. As friends.” Jughead looked at the red carnation she’d placed on the table, and at her silky blue shirt printed with tiny white stars, and something about the picture she presented made him think of hope - unless that was something he was projecting onto her perfectly-bloomed flower and pretty shirt - but regardless of whose optimism was gently being destroyed, it made something in his chest grumble and shift. 

Betty tucked her hair behind one of her ears. He realized, with a start, that he very rarely saw her wear it like that, down around her shoulders. 

Still hovering awkwardly by the chair across from hers, he asked, “You said… your friend thought you needed to get out more. Veronica?” 

“The one and only.” She quirked a brow at him. “Archie?” 

He nodded. “We can _never_ tell them about this.”

“Oh, absolutely not.” Betty flicked open her menu. “Sit down, Jug. You’re here; we may as well eat. I know you’re hungry.” 

He pulled out his chair and dropped into it, taking the carnation out of his buttonhole and setting it on the table next to hers. “The presumptuous way you said that is definitely part of our eight-percent _in_ compatibility.” 

Betty giggled, a lock of her hair falling into her face. Jughead concentrated every ounce of his attention on the list of appetizers. 

 

 

 

(Okay, he thought about it one other time. 

Just one other time, when he was thirteen or fourteen. It was summer, brutally hot, and it felt like something was boiling inside of him, too. Betty appeared in the Andrews’ backyard, backlit by the sun like she was one of its beams. Her seersucker dress was striped and short; her feet were bare. She looked like she’d waltzed off of the seaside set of a 1940s movie and Jughead was struck, inexplicably, by the delicacy of her wrist when she waved. As she took a seat in the grass, the skirt of her dress billowed upward, and Jughead was done in, somehow, by the way the tan above her knees faded away slowly the higher his gaze raked up her legs, by the single mole he spotted on her thigh. 

For the duration of those slow-motion moments, Jughead was sure he was in love. 

But that - that was before.)

 

 

 

Betty licked a last bit of caramel off her fork before setting it down. “So who should we say my date was with?”

“Chad,” Jughead replied, without missing a beat. 

A little smile slipped onto her lips. “He sounds like a jerk.”

“Oh, he is.” Jughead pushed aside his own plate - remnants of the caramel sauce that had decoratively surrounded his slice of cheesecake in artful swirls fully scraped away - in order to rest his elbows on the tabletop. “He lifts. He’s really into _gains_. Wears a lot of tank tops. Kitchen cupboards packed with protein powder.”

“So he’s strong?” she asked teasingly, with a dramatic flutter of her eyelashes. 

“Is _that_ your type, Betts?” he teased right back. “Because Reggie Mantle would’ve given you his letterman jacket.” 

“Stop,” she said with a roll of her eyes, leaning back in her chair. 

“I’m serious.”

“You’re serious,” she repeated. “The captain of the Riverdale High Bulldogs, and me. You think we were meant to be?” 

“Did you prefer his friend?” Jughead asked, settling into the easy flow of the conversation. “The blond one? What was that kid’s name again, something like - ”

“No.” Betty’s voice turned firm, smile gone from her mouth and absent from her voice. “I preferred nothing about _him_.” 

The venom in her voice surprised him, but what was more surprising still was the way a memory slithered up out of the recesses of his mind and lodged itself firmly into his train of thought - his mother, her grey eyes flickering with something enigmatic, two fingers pressing white indentations into her bottom lip. 

After studying Betty’s face for a beat, trying to erase the abrupt vision of his mother from his mind, he asked, “So who was my date with?” 

The tension seemed to evaporate out of her, muscles of her neck and shoulders relaxing. “Her name is… Amanda.”

“Seems innocuous enough. She pretty?” 

“Yes. Blonde hair, blue eyes.”

“Sounds like someone else I know.”

“My eyes are _green_ , Jughead,” Betty said, those very eyes narrowing slightly. “In her spare time, Amanda keeps up with the Kardashians. She’s majoring in… kinesiology.” 

With an exaggerated cringe, he asked, “She likes sports?” 

Nodding, Betty said, “Soccer. Hockey. Volleyball. She likes it all.” 

“How the hell did we end up with ninety-two percent compatability?” 

Eyes bright enough that he could never mistake their colour, she said, “Must have been an error in the matching algorithm.” 

 

 

 

After he settled into his dorm room in the very first week of college, a room he shared with Archie and that would eventually take on the permanent aroma of sweat, Doritos, printer ink, and weed, he went to visit his mother.

At her small, badly-scarred kitchen table, as steam rose from his mug of freshly-brewed tea, he slid his phone toward her to show her pictures from prom. Her smile when she looked at the shot of him with Archie, their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, was soft, almost downright maternal. 

“You clean up nicely, don’t you,” she said fondly, and for a minute he was thoroughly, profoundly happy that he’d decided to go to Goldspire, to move to the town in which she lived. 

But then Gladys flicked to the next picture, one that featured both he and Betty smiling slightly, neither of them looking at the camera as she struggled to pin on his boutonnière, and his mother's mouth took on the shape of a snarl, a quiet hiss escaping past her lips. She dropped the phone on the table, rattling their cups of tea; boiling-hot droplets fell over his forearm. 

“ _Who is that_?” she asked. 

“Betty,” he said frowning. “Cooper. Archie’s next door neighbour. You remember her?”

Gladys pressed the tips of two of her fingers, middle and ring, against her mouth. “Forsythe,” she whispered. “Stay away from her.”

He frowned and said, “Mom,” but she shook her head forcefully, her eyes falling shut as though he was causing her physical pain. 

Jughead attributed it to jealousy. Betty looked an awful lot like her mother, and he had a long-standing suspicion that Alice, once upon a time, before she was the formidable Mrs. Cooper, had been involved with his father. 

He dismissed his mother, just as she so often dismissed him. 

 

 

 

He walked Betty back to her dorm, ignoring her insistent protests that she’d be fine on her own. The sky was full of misty clouds, the moon three-quarters full. They tucked their hands in the pockets of their coats against the late October chill. 

“How’s RA life treating you?” 

“Not bad. I’ve only had to call the paramedics once.” 

“Betty Cooper,” he said appreciatively. “Single-handedly keeping first-years alive.”

Chin ducked into the collar of her coat, she told him, “Someone’s got to.” 

There was silence between them then, their footsteps against the sidewalk supplying the only sound. The quiet of the town was a reminder that spurred him to ask, “Do you ever miss home?” 

Her answer was immediate: “No, not really.” Their steps synced up into a regular pattern, broken on occassion by the crunch of fallen leaves beneath one of their shoes. “The best parts of home moved here with me.” 

He grabbed the side of his jaw. “Ouch, Betts; I think you just gave me a toothache using _words alone_.” 

“Shut up, Juggie,” she said, side-stepping so that her shoulder bumped against his. The absence of her footfalls lining up in perfect tandem with his was, inexplicably, strikingly audible to him. “I meant it.” 

His fingers twitched with the weirdest impulse, like he wanted to hold her hand. “I know.” 

“What about you? Do you miss home?” 

“You know,” he said on a long, slow sigh, “sometimes I think I do.” 

He glanced upward, above the naked branches of the trees. The moon stared back. 

 

 

 

“I think she’s _it_ , man,” Archie said with the kind of dreamy sigh most authors would attribute to a preteen girl, and Jughead wished - not for the first time - that he’d spent his life keeping track of how many times Archie’d uttered that sentence, so that he could read the list back to his swooning friend in moments like this. 

“I’m glad you’re happy, Arch. Even if it means I have to invest in noise-cancelling headphones.”

“Sorry about that,” Archie said sheepishly, not looking the least bit sorry. “Jug, you know, you really should try it.”

Jughead laid his open book down atop his chest. “I should try _Mystery Date_?”

“Yeah.” 

He shook his head against the sofa cushion, very nearly dislodging his beanie from where it sat atop his hair. “Your lovesickness is beginning to affect your faculties. I don’t want a girlfriend.” 

“I didn’t say anything about a girlfriend.” Archie perched on one of the barstools at their kitchen counter and looked, suddenly, very much like his father. “Dude, just… have some fun. I’m not even saying you need to sleep with anybody, okay, just go meet a girl. Have some food or a drink and talk to her. Maybe make out with her for a while. Maybe more, maybe not, whatever. I just feel like you spend way too much time in this apartment. We’re in _college_. I know your grades are important to you, but you’re already on the fuckin’ Dean’s List. Sign up for the app and see what happens.” 

Jughead made a hybrid sound, half irritated growl, half long-suffering sigh. “What happened to meeting girls the old-fashioned way?”

With a small scoff, Archie said, “Jughead, you’re my brother and I love you, but honestly, this?” He waved a hand toward Jughead’s entire being. “Not exactly inviting.” 

Frowning, Jughead grumbled, “I take your point.”

“Great!” Archie beamed and held up his phone. “I already made you an account.” 

 

 

 

“Well, I had fun,” Betty said, scuffing the toe of her boot against the ground as they slowed to a stop in front of her dorm. The wind whipped her hair around, and she gathered it into a ponytail, which she held into place with one hand. “Sorry I wasn’t the love of your life.” 

Jughead smiled at her. “Honestly, I think I had a way better time tonight than I would’ve on some blind date.” 

“Me, too. Thanks for walking me back.” 

“Any time,” he said simply. 

She released her hair and it blew about wildly again as she reached out, rising onto her tiptoes as she wound her arms around his neck in a hug. “Goodnight, Jughead.” 

He squeezed her back lightly. She was startlingly small in his arms; he forgot, sometimes, that all her ferocious willpower was packaged in a body quite a bit shorter than his, soft in all the places he himself was hard. “Goodnight, Betty.” 

He watched her walk inside - she tossed him a quick, sweet smile over her shoulder - and he was still watching the heavy wooden door of Thornhill Hall drift shut behind her when a voice asked, “Exactly what do you think you’re doing?”

 

 

 

He figured that - for once, perhaps for the first time ever - Archie might just be right. 

He’d resigned himself to the reality that his life was never going to be normal. Even long ago, even before, that had seemed like a very slim possibility; he was a weird kid, a poor one, a kid with a thousand defenses erected before he’d even made it halfway through elementary school. The Andrews’, the family that had modelled normalcy and kindness for him, living within that old, elusive American Dream, had fractured when he was fifteen years old, leaving him with very little to believe in. It didn’t matter that everything had changed less than a year later - there had never been a day when the narrative of Jughead Jones’ life lead to a white picket fence. 

For a long time, it didn’t bother him that it was impossible to introduce a girlfriend into the hell that was his life. He’d never been girl-crazy like Archie, and he wasn't particularly interested in any of the girls in their hometown. He was content with the knowledge that the boy and girl he’d met in the sandbox had carved out permanent places in his life, and he assumed he’d take his place on the fringes of their normal lives one day and be the weird uncle to their respective children. 

But Archie was right: just because he wasn’t in a position to have a girlfriend, that didn’t mean he couldn’t date. He still had a life to live, no matter how strange it might be, and he deserved to enjoy at least some of it. He had to stop punishing himself for something entirely out of his control. 

So he decided to put on a nice outfit, forego his beanie, dive in feet first, and hope for the best. He forgot, momentarily, that the best had never hoped for him. 

 

 

 

Jughead whirled around. “Christ, Cheryl.” 

She strode toward him, dressed all in black save for the lining of her cape (her fucking _cape_ ), which was vibrant red. “What was that? A date?” 

“Why do you need to know?” 

“Why are you being evasive?” A slow smirk found its way onto her lips and her eyes glowed as she regarded him. She turned those eyes guileless and big, shifted her mouth into a mocking pout, and asked, “Why is your heart beating so quickly?” 

His hand twitched, every muscle going tense, his nails threatening to crack open. “Stop fucking reading me, Cheryl.” 

She circled him, stalking him like he was her prey. “Your mother told you to stay away from that girl.” 

“Yeah, and she has a tradition of doling out excellent parental advice.” 

Cheryl came to an abrupt stop, her cape snapping through the air. “This isn’t the time for your mommy issues, Forsythe. That girl isn’t safe.” 

“How?” he demanded. “How? She’s like the living embodiment of cotton candy.” 

“ _Liar._ ” The word was a growl that seemed to pierce the air with the force of sharpened fangs. “You know better than anyone that _people_ are much different inside than out.” 

“She’s one of my oldest friends.” 

“You sentimental little _boy_ ,” Cheryl hissed. “If you’re that spineless, why don’t you listen to your mother? Gladys is right; she almost always is. That girl - ”

“She has a name.”

“She’s a danger.” Cheryl sighed and seemed to soften, ever so slightly. “Ne sois pas stupide.” 

“I don’t fucking speak French,” he snapped, for what felt like the infinite time. “And I’m not being stupid.”

“Foolish,” she corrected quietly. “You’re being foolish.” 

In the distance, he heard a low howl, tender and beckoning, and he knew right away - Jason. 

Cheryl turned her face into the wind and closed her eyes. The line of her jaw was sharp enough to wound. 

“She will undo you,” she said. “If you let her. Don’t.” 

And then Cheryl was gone, melted away into the night, and Jughead was utterly alone, the campus silent around him, the darkness pentrated by the occassional glow of warm light from a window. 

 

 

 

He would always remember, would never be able to forget: lying in the dirt in the woods down by Sweetwater River, body wracked with agony, naked as the day he was born, his mother cradling him, shushing him, like he was an infant, his voice nothing short of a yowl. 

“Don’t do this to me,” he’d sobbed, his voice breaking on every word, every syllable. “ _Don’t do this to me_.” 

But, of course, it had already been done. 

 

 

 

Jughead turned his eyes to the moon. It seemed to return his gaze, merciless, unyielding.

It was almost Hallowe’en. 

 

 

(to be continued… )


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Onward! Thanks to everyone who's been reading so far. We hope you continue to enjoy this as much as we are!

Jughead, Betty thought. _Jughead_. 

Well, she was sure that if she had been on enough blind dates to enable comparisons between them, this evening would by no means be the worst. Even if, in the end, it wasn’t a date at all. 

By now, she had approximately twenty million unread texts from Veronica. Betty sighed briefly at her phone before typing out a quick _Long story. I’m going to bed now. Tell you tomorrow_. Then she put her phone on do not disturb. 

She looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror that hung over the back of her door, watching her fingers undo each button of her shirt, top to bottom. 

Jughead, she thought again. _Jughead_. She shrugged off the shirt, removed her bra and jeans, and pulled on her pajamas. 

Jughead, she thought, as she washed her face and brushed her teeth. 

She climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to her chin, trying to decide which was funnier: the idea that she might ever want to date Jughead Jones, or the idea that _he_ might want to date _her_. Or, she supposed, the idea that he might want to date anyone at all. 

That was it. She had to debrief; she would never sleep until she did, so she threw the covers off and grabbed her phone. To her immense surprise—it was Saturday night, after all, even if he was three hours behind her—Kevin answered her call.

“Elizabeth Cooper. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I miss you,” she said. “Tell me again why you had to go to college all the way in Los Angeles?”

“I miss you too,” Kevin replied, “and for the third time this year alone, surfers.”

She laughed, and let Kevin catch her up on his recent midterms, the spring semester internship he’d secured at a major film studio (“but in accounting, so not _that_ exciting, I probably won’t see a single movie star”), and his current crush.

“No moves yet,” he said, “but soon. I have a plan.”

Betty raised her eyebrows, though she knew Kevin couldn’t see her face. “Is it your usual plan of accosting him in a hallway and spilling all your feelings?”

“Maybe.” Kevin’s voice was just a tad defensive. “You have to admit that the direct approach has its merits.”

“That’s true.”

“Anyway,” he said. “Fascinating though my love life is, I have the feeling that’s not why you’re calling.”

“It’s not,” Betty said. “It’s, uh—it’s my love life, actually. Kind of.”

Kevin gasped.

“Remember I told you I’d been hanging out with Archie’s new girlfriend, and she kind of made me sign up for that blind dating app?” 

“Oh my god. You went on a date. You met someone?” 

“Well, that’s the thing,” Betty said. “I didn’t exactly _meet_ anyone. It set me up with… with Jughead.” 

A loud and uncomfortable noise in her ear indicated that Kevin had dropped his phone on the floor. He picked it up a moment later. 

“Jughead Jones,” he said, obviously fighting to contain his laughter. “An app set you up on a blind date with that beanie-wearing weirdo? This is the best thing I've ever heard. Never take the advice of an app again, Betty.” 

“It was kind of hilarious to both of us, actually,” she said, and then she filled Kevin in on the fictitious Amanda and Chad. They hung up after about half an hour, Betty's mind feeling a bit less tangled.

Just before she slipped over the edge into sleep, Betty recalled that Jughead— _Jughead_ , whose beanie was visible in every single picture from her senior prom—had taken it off for his blind date.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She was on her way to the dining hall the next morning when a familiar, sweaty redhead in running clothes started waving at her. She waved back, but kept walking, knowing he’d catch up with her in a matter of seconds. 

“Hey, Archie,” she said, when he arrived at her elbow. 

“Hey,” he replied. “What are you up to?” 

“Just going to breakfast.” 

“Want to come over to our place?” 

She wondered, briefly, if there was a way to politely decline. Not that she felt as though she needed to avoid Jughead, exactly; she just thought he might not appreciate her showing up in his apartment so soon afterwards. “Uh…” 

“You can hear about Jughead’s blind date,” Archie added. “He came home last night and locked himself in his room.”

“It went that badly?”

“All he said was ‘It could have been worse.’” 

Betty tilted her head sideways, just a little, and examined her oldest friend closely. “You’re trying to get me to make you my famous pumpkin pancakes, huh?” 

Archie grinned, a little sheepishly. “It’s October,” he said. “Besides, I have a feeling Jughead’s not going to tell me anything about his date unless I feed him first.” 

Despite the fact that she’d indulged in cheesecake last night, pancakes did sound awfully good. 

“Do you have a can of pumpkin at your place?” 

He nodded. “ _And_ Veronica brought over some really fancy coffee the other day.” 

She was in.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“I’m worried about Jughead,” Archie said one Monday lunchtime, flicking his eyes across the Riverdale High cafeteria like he expected Jughead to show up with his usual overstuffed lunch tray, even though Jughead clearly wasn’t at school today. “He was out on Friday, and he hasn’t been answering my phone calls. Or texts.” 

“Did his phone get turned off again?”

Archie shook his head. “I don’t think so. He hasn’t answered any emails, either.” 

Betty stabbed a fork into the mystery casserole on her tray and wished, fervently, that she’d brought her lunch today. “He probably just has a cold, Archie.” 

“Maybe we should drive over there after school,” Archie continued, ignoring her. “I mean, I know he hates it when I just kind of show up, but…” He shrugged. “It’s been four days.” 

Even though they lived less than a mile from school, Archie had been proudly driving every morning since receiving his driver’s license and sole possession of his dad’s old truck, so as soon as the bell rang, Betty met him in the parking lot. They swung by Pop’s for takeout as a sort of preemptive peace offering, and twenty minutes later they were pulling up next to the Jones’s trailer. Betty had only been here a few times before, and as always, the irony of the trailer park’s name struck her. Riverdale as a whole tended to have pretty gloomy weather, but the sky over Sunnyside seemed permanently overcast. All the curtains were drawn, which struck her as unnecessary.

Archie’s truck was not the only vehicle parked in front of the Jones residence. F.P.’s truck was gone, but the old motorcycle was there, and next to it was an unfamiliar car with out-of-state tags. 

“Whose is that?” Betty asked, nodding towards the car. Archie threw her a bewildered look. 

They knocked on the trailer’s door, and a few moments later, it opened just a crack. Jughead’s face peered out from the shadows.

“What?” he hissed. 

“It’s us,” said Archie. “Can we come in?” 

Jughead threw a glance over his shoulder. “This isn’t a good time.” 

Beside her, Archie twitched. “Where have you been? We were worried about you.” 

“We brought food,” Betty said helpfully, holding up the Pop’s bag. 

The door opened a little bit wider, and Betty almost gasped. Jughead looked awful. His skin was almost a grayish color, and the usually-faint bags under his eyes had turned so deeply purple that for half a second, Betty thought he’d been punched in the face. His flannel shirt hung open, and she thought the white undershirt he wore underneath it might be stained with fresh sweat. 

He sighed—not a deep sigh, but a short and irritated one that cut Betty off before she could say anything about his appearance. “Look, I’ve just—I’ve been sick. I’ll see you in school tomorrow, okay?” 

An unfamiliar female voice came from inside the trailer, though Betty couldn’t make out any distinct words. 

Nor could Archie, judging by the look on his face. “Who’s that?” he asked, even though Jughead was clearly not in the mood to answer any questions. “And whose car is that?” 

Jughead exhaled again. “My mom’s here.” 

This news clearly threw Archie for a loop. “Oh.” 

“We’ll leave you alone,” Betty said. She was, she now realized, already digging the nails of her left hand into the meat of her thumb. 

Her right hand, which by now had dropped to her side, still held the Pop’s bag. It occurred to her that a greasy burger and greasier onion rings was not a great meal for someone recovering from an illness. Nevertheless, she raised the bag higher again. Jughead’s eyes flickered towards it, his gaze so ravenous that Betty wondered if he’d been well enough to eat anything over the weekend. 

“Do you want us to run out for chicken soup or something, Juggie?” 

“No,” he said. He took the bag from her and inhaled deeply. “This is…” He shook his head. “This is great. Thanks, guys. You’re superheroes. Really.” 

Jughead’s mom called from somewhere inside the trailer again. 

“Yeah, I’m coming,” he called back. 

“Jughead, tell us if you need anything,” said Archie, who looked like he was about to cry. 

“I will,” Jughead replied, in a voice that clearly meant _I won’t_. 

At this point, even Archie picked up on the fact that they were being dismissed. They climbed in the truck, and Archie turned the ignition as Betty stared hard at the trailer’s windows...through which she could see nothing, since all the curtains were closed. There was a way, Betty knew, that she could see more. But she wouldn’t do that to her friend. 

“I didn’t think Jug’s mom was still coming to Riverdale,” Archie said quietly. 

“She moved away a while ago, right?” Betty couldn’t remember exactly when, but it had been a few years at least. “To Glenspire Falls?” 

Archie nodded. They drove back to the North Side in silence. 

The next day, Jughead was leaning against his locker when she arrived at Riverdale High. He still seemed a little bit worse for wear, but was his usual self otherwise, and thoughts of secret late-night visits to Sunnyside Trailer Park left her entirely.

  
  
  
  
  
  


True to form, Jughead appeared in the apartment’s common area exactly forty-five seconds after the bacon hit the frying pan. She was expecting that. She was not expecting him to be shirtless and in boxers, and judging by the flush that was now creeping over his cheeks, Jughead hadn’t been expecting to find her in his kitchen at all. 

“Betty?” 

_Wait_ , Betty thought, _when did Jughead get…_

“Good morning,” she called, as cheerfully as she could muster. “I was just about to start coffee.” 

She shook her head, trying to clear it, and turned back to the coffee pot. She didn’t turn around again until she heard one of the stools being dragged away from the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen area from the living area. It was Archie, though, freshly showered and already pouring a glass of the orange juice she’d found in the fridge and set on the counter. Jughead joined him a few moments later, now fully dressed. 

“Archie,” he said, pulling up his own bar stool, “you didn’t tell me we had company. Well, more company.” 

Betty turned on Archie. “Wait, _more_ company?” 

“I wasn’t sure you were awake,” Archie said to Jughead, and then, “Veronica’s here,” just as Veronica herself emerged from the hallway. 

Archie and Veronica exchanged a very definite Glance, one with a capital G. Betty locked eyes with Jughead and knew at once that he’d picked up on their none-too-subtle scheming, too. 

“So, Betty,” Jughead said, an extra sardonic edge in his voice. “I hear you had quite the blind date last night.” 

“Mm. You know, I think the less said about Chad, the better.” She tipped the bacon onto a paper-towel-covered plate, and set the plate in front of Jughead. “I hear _you_ had quite the blind date last night.” 

“Oh my god, you guys,” said Veronica, a delighted grin spreading across her face. “How funny would it have been if Mystery Date had matched you two up with each other?” 

“Incredibly funny,” replied Jughead, not missing a beat. “But if it had happened, we’d all be laughing at that, now, wouldn’t we, and not at the image of me trying to keep up a conversation with Amanda the kinesiology major? Her biggest passions are Crossfit and celebrity Instagram accounts.” 

He shoved a piece of bacon in his mouth, chewed thoughtfully for a moment, and caught her gaze again as he swallowed. 

“Did you put a maple glaze on this, Betts?”

She nodded. “Chad wouldn’t have approved.” 

“Amanda, either,” he said. “She’s on a ketogenic diet, and no, I did not know what that was before last night.” 

“Was she at least cute?” Archie asked. 

“Oh, sure.” Jughead waved dismissively, using a second piece of bacon for emphasis. “Blonde hair, blue eyes, the whole nine. But can you really see me with anyone who’s deliberately eschewing carbohydrates?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Over the next week, Betty continued to cover her floor of Thornhill Hall in layer upon layer of Halloween decorations. She wrote two articles on responsible party-going for the school paper. She walked Ethel Muggs home from the library again, wondering if it would be for the greater good for her to just scare the hell out of Ethel once—then, maybe, Ethel would start calling the campus buddy system hotline for an escort home. She picked up some things for the Halloween costume she’d wear to Veronica’s party. She met with her therapist and (having not been entirely truthful regarding the specifics of her blind date) received praise for the fact that she’d had so much positive social interaction in the last two weeks. 

She did not cast sidelong glances at Jughead as they sat beside each other in their English seminar, wondering how she’d never noticed how nicely his heavy wool sweaters and fleece-lined jackets fell across his shoulders. She definitely did not do that. She didn't imagine squeezing next to him on the loveseat at the local coffee shop, and she didn't think about how nice it would be to skip all the getting-to-know-you stuff that seemed like the worst part of a new relationship. She didn't do that, not even if it was a solid, established fact that they got along well. 

A fleece-lined jacket. That was what she needed. Not a boyfriend. 

“Jughead?” she said, on Wednesday. “Can I borrow your brown jacket this weekend?” 

He raised an eyebrow. “One botched blind date and you’re already trying to wear my clothes?” 

“For my Halloween costume,” she said. “I promise I’ll take good care of it.” 

His hand was resting atop the desk, and her eyes drifted to it; she watched him rub the pad of his thumb rub across his index and middle fingers. There was something almost hypnotic about the gesture. 

She sat up as straight as possible and forced herself to look back at his face. 

“Sure,” he said. “Anything you need.” 

She did squeeze onto the coffee shop's love seat with Veronica, who nagged her several times about communicating with her next-best matches on Mystery Date. 

“I really don’t have time right now, Ronnie,” she said, and hoped that would remain enough of an excuse. 

“As long as you have time to come to my Halloween party,” Veronica sighed. “It simply won’t do if you’re not in attendance.” 

“Of course I’m coming.” 

She was pretty sure a Veronica Lodge party would be so crowded, and Veronica Lodge herself so busy playing hostess, that she wouldn’t notice if Betty disappeared every few minutes. After all, _somebody_ had to be ready to secretly steal the keys of anyone too drunk to drive.

  
  
  
  
  
  


At the sharp rap against her windowpane, Betty jumped. She jumped again when she looked at the window itself. Thankfully, one or the other of her jumps had resulted in her banging her funny bone against her vanity, so she wasn’t worried about fading into nothingness as she crossed the room to open the window. She merely winced in pain. 

“Hey there, Juliet. Nurse off duty?”

“Very funny,” Betty said, rolling her eyes. They’d recited the passage in English class earlier that day, Betty perched unsteadily atop a desk while Jughead crouched on the floor at her feet. “You know this house has a front door and stairs, right?” 

She peered outside as Jughead clambered into her room. Sure enough, he’d taken the old wooden ladder that her father had theoretically been using to clean the gutters and moved it to her window. Had he really gone to all that trouble just to make a stupid _Romeo and Juliet_ reference? 

_Dork_ , she thought, not without affection. 

Rain had been falling all day, and although Jughead wasn’t particularly damp, he brought with him a distinct scent of wet dog. She must have been making some sort of face at the smell, because Jughead looked a little embarrassed.

“Just walked Vegas,” he said, shrugging. “Archie’s at football practice.”  

“Juggie, what are you doing here?”

He dug around in his backpack and produced a folder. “Forgot to give you this rough draft for the paper earlier.” 

“You could have emailed it.” _Dork_ , she thought again. But she took the folder anyway, and put it on her desk. 

“And miss the chance to have my work handed back to me covered in red ink? Never.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


A light tap at her door roused Betty from the nap she hadn’t known she was taking. Her immediate thought was that one of her residents was having some sort of crisis. 

“It’s not locked,” she called. She pushed herself up on her elbows—having learned the hard way not to spring to one’s feet when one slept in a lofted dorm bed—and peered at the clock that was across the room on her desk. _Crap_ , she thought; she was supposed to be at Veronica’s in ten minutes, a toilet was probably clogged somewhere, and she wasn’t even dressed for the party yet. She didn’t even have all the pieces of her costume in hand. 

The bed shook slightly, and a familiar head poked up over the bed railing, beanie-free for the evening. 

“Hey there, Juliet.” 

“Jughead, what…” She blinked a couple of times. “What are you wearing?” 

“Veronica’s party is not costume optional,” he said. “Which I know you know, since I’m supplying part of your costume.” He tossed a brown fleece-lined jacket on the foot of her bed. She caught a whiff of fabric softener as it flew through the air, and wondered idly if Jughead had washed it for her. 

“Trust me, I’ve heard,” Betty grumbled. “I just haven’t changed yet. So you’re…” She raised an eyebrow at his old leather jacket and fitted white t-shirt, and smiled a little. 

“Generic 1950s heartthrob, obviously.” He said this as though it was a joke, and looked a little embarrassed. “I’m aware that that’s not obvious. But you know how I feel about spending money on a joke outfit you can only wear once.” 

“So you bought a leather jacket instead?” 

“No,” he said, swinging off the ladder, “I already _had_ a leather jacket; it was my dad’s. You’ve just never seen me wear it.”

She followed him down the ladder, landed on the floor, and took all of him in. “Why not?” 

He shrugged. “Feels a little silly.” 

“It looks good on you.” It did. It really, really did. Not just the leather jacket, but the whole package. Who knew? “Um, give me five minutes to get ready?” 

She examined herself critically in the mirror when she was done dressing. Finding authentic hip-flared trousers had proven impossible on her budget, but she figured her dark khaki-colored leggings were good enough. A white blouse, neckerchief, flat-soled leather boots, aviator cap, and Jughead’s jacket completed the look. It was an immensely practical costume. 

For once, Betty didn’t feel like being practical. 

_I should be a sexier Amelia Earhart_ , Betty thought, undoing a couple of extra blouse buttons before the full ridiculousness of that desire hit her. 

She told herself she didn’t even know why the desire to be a little sexier had entered her mind, but then she opened her door and found Jughead leaning against the opposite wall in that fitted t-shirt and leather jacket, his legs crossed at the ankles, and every part of her body informed her that there was no use lying about it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She tried not to look at him too hard, or too often, as they walked to Veronica’s. But the temptation was difficult to resist. Tomorrow would be the full moon, and the night sky seemed especially bright. For his part, Jughead kept his eyes on the sidewalk ahead of them and his jaw slightly clenched. His skin seemed to have taken on a grayish pallor she hadn’t noticed inside the dorm. 

Betty might have been concerned, had she not known exactly how much Jughead loathed parties. Really, she was surprised he’d agreed to come at all. 

“You okay, Juggie?” The words slipped out before she could stop them. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he sighed, turning his head slightly towards her. “You know how bad I am at this stuff.” 

Before Betty could think too hard about it, or tell herself not to, she’d taken Jughead’s hand in hers. His palm felt surprisingly rough—almost calloused—as she pressed her fingertips into it, willing him not to disappear. 

“You’re not bad at it,” she said. “This isn’t high school, you know.” 

There was more to the thought, but Jughead seemed to be so taken aback by her friendly touch that she decided to leave the rest of it unsaid. She started to draw her hand away, too, but Jughead’s fingers closed slightly. 

“No,” he said, his voice so soft it was almost a growl. “It definitely isn’t.” 

He let go of her hand then, and they walked the rest of the way in a silence that was both unfamiliar and comfortable. 

They weren’t even through the front door of Veronica’s building before the evening started to go downhill. 

“Jughead, what the hell?” said a voice from the shadows, and before Betty quite knew what was happening, Jessica Rabbit was blocking their way. There was something in Jessica’s voice that made Betty’s blood run cold, and not in a fun Halloween kind of way. For all that she’d just insisted to Jughead that they were no longer in high school, that was _exactly_ what this moment felt like; this girl gave her the same chills she’d gotten every time she had to face Polly’s mean-girl brigade. 

“Nice to see you too, Cheryl. What are you doing here?” 

“Did you really think you could have a party without inviting _moi_?” Jessica Rabbit—or Cheryl, Betty supposed—whirled on her, all red hair and crimson lips and blinding white teeth, and cast a dismissive glance down Betty’s entire body. “Run inside, ragamuffin.” 

Betty turned her eyes to Jughead, who nodded towards the building. “Go,” he told her, sounding suddenly exhausted. “I’ll be in soon.” 

She walked past a boy she assumed to be Cheryl’s date, a pale boy with red hair exactly the same shade as hers. He wore white rabbit ears, oversized red overalls with a blue bow tie, and a sinister look that made Betty feel as though he might want to eat her. She recognized him, or thought she might, from proofreading the sports section of the school paper. He played water polo or something. 

Fighting a shudder, she picked up her pace. 

She knew what she could do, what she possibly _should_ do. But she also knew Jughead would never want her to do it, and so, she went inside.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Okay, you’re the most adorable Amelia Earhart I’ve ever seen,” Veronica stated. She came in for a hug, which was impeded by the enormous red brocade gown she wore. Her hair was curled in tight ringlets and piled neatly atop her head, but Betty didn’t quite get the costume until she spotted Archie, who was distributing drinks in a kilt, sporran, and mess jacket. 

“Wow,” she said, nodding first at Veronica, then across the room. 

Veronica grinned. “I know, right? I called him Preppy Outlander on our second date, and although I only meant it as a term of endearment, when we were brainstorming couples’ costumes…” She trailed off at the look on Betty’s face. “Okay, admittedly I was the only one brainstorming. But I literally could not resist the French high court. And I know you don’t see Archie the same way I do, but you have to admit that those knee socks are doing amazing things for his calves.” 

“Mm,” Betty said noncommittally, as the legs in question brought Archie across the room. He handed her a drink, and she took a sip without looking to see what it was. 

Vodka, cranberry, and Sprite. It _was_ her go-to, and she knew Archie knew that, but suddenly its general pinkness felt all wrong. 

“Thanks, Archie,” she said anyway, giving him a smile. 

The front door opened and Jughead slipped in, followed by the Rabbits. 

“Come say hi,” Veronica called. “I’d come to you, but it turns out my dress doesn’t play well with crowded rooms. Betty, have you met Cheryl and Jason Blossom? Cheryl's in my bio lab.” 

_They’re married?_ Betty thought, momentarily confused. The Blossoms hadn’t appeared to be much older than she was. But now that she saw them in better lighting, she realized no, they must be siblings. 

“Charmed,” said Cheryl, extending an evening-gloved hand that did not quite reach all the way to Betty. “We met outside. Ronnie, what’s to drink? With a getup like that, I’m expecting no less than a Macallan 18.” 

“That would be in the _secret_ cabinet,” Veronica replied. “And it’s Bruichladdich Black Art 5, I’m afraid. Will that do?” Betty had no idea what they were talking about, but Cheryl looked impressed despite herself. “Archiekins, will you escort Ms. Blossom to the VIP lounge?” 

Betty took a second sip of her drink, and when she looked up, realized Jughead had already retreated into a corner. Jason Blossom hovered about six feet away, though the two were neither talking nor looking at each other. What the hell was _that_ about? 

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” came Veronica’s voice in her ear. She snapped back to attention. 

“Probably not. What are you thinking?” 

Veronica smiled over her champagne goblet. “That I need to introduce you to a few people. Ms. Earhart, feast your eagle eyes on Jaime Lannister over there.” 

Though his name turned out to be Brandon, not Chad, Betty thought Jaime Lannister over there might be the physical manifestation of the fake blind date she and Jughead had concocted the previous weekend. She scanned the room for Jughead—he _had_ to hear about this—and saw a black leather jacket slipping out the door. 

“Jughead?” she called. He did not look back. 

_I want to disappear_ , Betty thought. She’d return to the party as soon as she could, and apologize to Veronica. She’d even agree to a date with Brandon as an act of penitence, if she had to.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jughead kept throwing glances over his shoulder, as though he knew someone was trailing him. She wondered who he thought it was. Jason Blossom, maybe? She kept looking back herself, but no giant rabbits appeared, and no sexy, sequined female ones either. Something was up with the Blossoms, and she wondered if Jughead would tell her what. The pallor she'd noticed earlier had only gotten worse since Cheryl had accosted them. 

Jughead walked on, and she followed.

The longer she let this go, Betty realized, the more awkward it was going to be when she finally revealed herself. Sighing, she stepped behind a nearby tree, dug her fingernails into her palms, waited fifteen seconds for Jughead to get a little farther away, and then came down the sidewalk at a jog. 

“Jughead!” she called again, trying to sound breathless, like she’d been running after him the whole time. 

“Betty, go back to the party,” he replied, without looking back. 

She caught up to him. “What if I don’t want to?” 

He raised an eyebrow at her, making him look even more like James Dean than before, and suddenly she really was breathless. 

“Veronica’s trying to set me up with someone,” she said, shrugging. “I’m not in the mood.”

This, at least, elicited a tiny smile. “Yeah, it’ll be hard to top your last date.” He was doing that thing with his fingers again. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to your dorm.” 

“I don’t want to go to my dorm.” Much as she normally liked her RA duties, her skin crawled at the thought of going back there now. “I’m not on duty, but ten to one if I set foot inside the front door, I’ll be cleaning up candy-colored puke within fifteen minutes.” 

Jughead nodded slowly. “Our apartment, then?” 

“Okay,” she said, and then went about trying to collect all her bravery. 

“Cheryl and Jason are related to friends of my mom’s, by the way,” he said. “If you were wondering how I knew them.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Even when they’d made it inside the apartment, Betty wasn’t sure she felt confident enough to draw on her inner Kevin Keller. 

She slipped out of Jughead’s jacket and handed it back to him; he folded it in half and placed it on the seat of one of the breakfast bar stools. 

As modest as Betty’s costume was, she still felt a bit exposed. She fiddled with one of the buttons she’d left undone, then realized Jughead was staring at her, and abruptly dropped her hands. 

“Thanks for letting me come over.” 

“You know you’re welcome any time,” he said. “We should probably just give you a key. You want a drink?” 

“No,” she said, steeling herself. “Well—water, maybe. But I want—Juggie, can we talk?” 

He bent into the fridge for the Brita, and grabbed a couple of glasses from the drying rack. “About?” 

“Amanda and Chad.” 

“You’re not suggesting we go on second dates with them, are you?” 

Jughead poured the water, then stepped out from the kitchen to hand her a glass. She stepped a little closer than she needed to in order to accept it, licked her lips, and slid her fingers over his instead of taking the glass outright. 

She was not great at reading guys; she never had been. She knew that. But she also knew there was a pull between them now, something palpable and electromagnetic, and she was pretty sure Jughead felt it too. 

“Betty,” he said, in that low almost-growl. 

She made herself look right into his eyes—difficult though that was. He was definitely trying to avoid her gaze. 

“I’ve just been wondering,” she said, softly, “if you ever considered whether that dating app might have been right.” 

“Whether we’re ninety-two percent compatible?” Jughead moved back half a step and put both glasses on the coffee table. “Yeah, of course I did.” 

“And?” 

Jughead didn’t answer at first. He didn’t even move. Finally, he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.” 

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter?” 

“It’s just an algorithm, Betts,” he said. “Look, you and I both know that if you’d never signed up for the app, if it had never sent us both to the same restaurant with red carnations, you would never have started thinking… whatever it is you’re thinking.” 

That might have been true, but it still stung. “Okay, maybe not,” she countered, “but I did, and it did, and now I am thinking it, so…” 

Jughead exhaled slowly, and she realized she was bouncing impatiently on the balls of her feet. She made herself stop. 

“Well, stop thinking it,” he said. 

She couldn’t read his expression at all, suddenly; couldn’t tell if that look was pained, amused, or simply meant he was not and would not ever be attracted to her. 

She hated— _hated_ —how bad she was at this. For a moment, there, she had really thought…

“Okay,” she said, wishing her voice didn’t sound so sad. “I’ll stop thinking.” 

“Okay,” Jughead echoed. His voice cracked. 

And then, before she quite knew what was happening, Jughead had slipped a hand behind each of her ears and was dropping his face to hers. Half a second later, their lips met. 

Half a second after that, for possibly the first time in her entire life, Betty Cooper stopped thinking. 

That was a lie. She felt Jughead’s tongue push softly against her lips, which she willingly parted. She slid her own hand up the back of his neck, into his hair, and she thought a single word. 

_Yes._

  
  
  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goldspire is a varietal of sugar maple, for the record. We couldn't resist.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am cobbling together a lot of sources to create the werewolf mythology in this fic, and also drawing on ideas of my own - so don't be alarmed if it doesn't necessarily seem 'standard.' 
> 
> Thank you from both of us for jumping into a new chapter of this war of ours!

Jughead thought that he, of all people, knew hunger. He was one of those kids who always seemed to be going through some sort of growth spurt, and there were days when he opened the refrigerator to find a paltry selection of offerings, most of them condiments or beer. It was something Archie’s mother, Mrs. Andrews, used to tease him about gently, with just a hint of sorrow in her eyes. He garnered a reputation as a bottomless pit.

After his sixteenth birthday, he realized hunger had thousands of dimensions. Hunger was not simply a frozen pizza burnt in the oven and then split four ways, leaving the stomach of a gangly teenage boy rumbling with demands for more. Hunger was something he felt in his bones, in his blood; it tickled his nostrils until his teeth gnashed. Hunger was a commander he could never disobey, as unstoppable as the tides, as the cycles of the moon. Hunger tore through his body until his head pitched back and his fingers dug hard into dirt, and the only relief was a sound that would rip from his throat, a single syllable in the key of mourning. Hunger was and would always be his constant companion, and he had come to know it well. 

But with Betty, it was different. With Betty, hunger became new. 

What he felt when she toyed with a button on her Amelia Earhart blouse, when she said _I am thinking it_ and then _I’ll stop thinking_ , it was familiar, to a certain degree, but it was also novel, unknown. Like all hunger, it wanted to be satisfied, but there was also something about it that begged for restraint, that wanted to be stretched to its limits, to feed on its desires in a way that might go on eternally. And when he kissed her - 

When he kissed her. 

When he kissed her, she was so _pliant_ under his hands and his lips, as if welcoming him to the feast that he so craved. She allowed his tongue entrance to her mouth and she tasted like vodka and cranberry juice and Kit-Kat bars and something a little synthetic - lip gloss, maybe. Her hands were on him, and even as her fingers skimmed over the back of his neck and up into her hair, he could feel the softness of her skin. His senses felt overloaded with her, with everything that was Betty Cooper. 

He touched the button on her shirt, the one she’d been playing with earlier. He slipped his fingers past it and touched her skin, the valley between her breasts. She arched her back just a little, pressing into that touch like she wanted more of it, and Jughead groaned, low and deep in his throat. 

“I can’t do this with you,” he said, but the words didn’t have their intended force, not when they came out heavy with breathlessness, not when his lips were still brushing over hers. 

She fingered the lapel of his leather jacket, her eyes darting up to meet his for a beat. They were a little dazed, her eyes, pupils blown. He wondered if her eyes had always been so green, had always danced with so many things, or if she was as hungry as he was. 

All she said was, “Juggie,” in a voice just as stupidly swooning as his, but it undid something within him, unravelled it entirely, and as he took a step forward and she took a step back, and their feet continued shuffling slowly down the hallway that lead to the bedrooms, it was as though he left the invisible string that had tied it together - whatever _it_ was - on the floor behind him, promptly covered by his jacket when he shrugged it off a moment later. 

 

 

 

He woke to the feeling of a sharp fingernail jabbing itself into his cheek. Sitting up abruptly, his eyes not even entirely open, he said, “What the f - ” and then a hand slapped over his nose and mouth. 

The scent of the hand was that of a cloying perfume, but beneath those notes was a smell Jughead recognized all too well, a smell that drew him in, the reek of a family he’d never asked for. Despite himself, he breathed it in deeply. 

“Quiet,” Cheryl hissed, and removed her hand. She jutted her chin to the other side of his bed. 

He turned his head, and his heart thumped so heavily in his chest it very nearly hurt. On his right, Betty was curled up beneath his ratty old plaid comforter, one hand sandwiched between her cheek and the pillow. Given that she’d never returned to her dorm, she’d never washed off her makeup, and there were faded shades of brown and gold on her eyelids, the tiniest flecks of mascara dotted upon her cheeks, perfectly pink long-wearing lipstick settled into the thin lines of the skin on her lips. Maybe those things should’ve broken the spell he appeared to be under, but instead they made his throat tighten with a painful rush of emotion. Betty was so beautiful like this, and so vulnerable. She’d trusted him with herself: her open heart, her curiosity, her tranquil slumber. Realizing just how much of a danger he could pose to her made it difficult to swallow. 

“You’re even more of a moron than I suspected,” Cheryl whispered. Every one of her words was perfectly enunciated and bone-chillingly sharp, despite her quiet tone. “I owe you fifty dollars, don’t I, Jay-Jay? I’m afraid I had too much faith.”

Jughead followed her gaze and realized, with a start, that Jason was standing in the doorway of his room, one shoulder propped casually against the doorjamb. He nodded in response to his sister’s question. 

He cast another look at Betty, wondering how much longer she could possibly sleep through angry, copper-haired twins invading his bedroom. “You two need to get the hell out of here,” he said lowly. “How did you even get _in_?” 

“You always ask the stupidest questions, Forsythe,” Cheryl said in a bored voice, then sighed. “Nana wants us all at the estate by this afternoon. And you’ve slept through half the morning.” 

Jughead’s frown deepened, partially because he knew Betty was an early riser, so the longer Cheryl and Jason remained, the more likely it was that she’d wake up, and partially because he was beginning to notice things about Cheryl. She was wearing no jewellery, aside from the spider brooch she never appeared to be without. She was wearing pants. Her signature mane of red curls was up in a _ponytail_. 

“Okay,” he said. “Just go, and then I’ll wake her up, and I’ll meet you - ”

Cheryl released a flurry of hushed but unmistakably annoyed words in French, her upper lip pulling back in the beginnings of a snarl. Jughead was sure it wasn’t his imagination that her canines looked especially sharp. She concluded her tirade with, “ _Maintenant_ ,” and though Jughead had refused to learn French from the very beginning, he recognized _now_ when he heard it. In his peripheral vision, he saw Jason stand up straight in the doorway, and he thought it really shouldn’t have been intimidating, not when Jason was so lean and delicate-looking, particularly in comparison to the other redheaded guy in Jughead’s life - and yet, intimidating it was. 

“Well, I have to get dressed,” he pointed out, letting a bit of his own irritation slip into his voice but not quite daring to match Cheryl’s level.

She arched an eyebrow at him as if to say _go on_.

He looked back and forth between the Blossoms, his hands clenching around fistfuls of his bedsheet. “Some privacy?” 

Cheryl breathed a laugh that was nearly soundless. “Oh, _Juggie_ ,” she said, flicking her eyes toward Betty, who was still, mercifully, asleep. “Everyone here has seen it all already.” But she stepped away from the side of his bed and gestured to Jason with her hand; he turned to leave and she followed, not turning back as she told Jughead, “Be quick.” 

He exhaled slowly once they were gone, the door almost-but-not-quite shut behind them, and unclenched his fists as he looked at Betty once again. She was breathing steadily, half of her face pressed into the pillow, and he wanted to flop back down on the mattress, sling an arm around her waist, and stay there with her for the rest of the day, or possibly forever. But as much as he wanted to ignore Cheryl, he couldn’t. She wasn’t in charge, and neither was he. 

He reached a hand out toward Betty’s shoulder, intending to shake her awake gently, and then stopped with his hand hovering less than an inch above her. What was he going to say to her? _I’m sorry, I have to go, last night was amazing, let’s talk about it in a couple days?_ No way would she accept that. Even if he tried to hurry out while she was not quite awake, she’d be on his heels in less than a minute - and if she was on his heels, she’d be facing Cheryl and Jason, here to collect the youngest member of their pack. 

Very carefully, he tucked her hair back behind her ear. He couldn’t wake her up. But he also couldn’t just _leave_ her. It would be a shitty thing to do in any situation, but an even more awful thing to do in this one; she wasn't a girl he met at a Halloween party, nor was she his blind date Amanda. She was Betty. 

In the end, after he’d pulled on jeans, shoved his head through a henley, and tugged his beanie on over his hair, he scribbled her a hasty note. 

_Family emergency_ , he wrote, which was, if a few mental leaps were made, in the realm of the truth. _I have to go. I’m really sorry. Last night_

He stopped, his grip tightening on his pencil. After a moment of thought, he crossed out the last two words and wrote, instead, _I’m glad you came over. Jughead._ Then he allowed himself one last glance at her, at the peace painted over her face. 

“I am an asshole,” he mumbled to himself, closing his bedroom door behind him as quietly as he possibly could. 

 

 

 

In the winter of their junior year of high school, he found himself alone in a booth with Betty at Pop’s. 

Archie had ditched them both for the girl he was madly in love with that week. Betty rolled her eyes upon reading their mutual friend’s barely apologetic text, slipped her phone into the front pocket of her backpack, turned to look at him wearing the soft smile that was magically, inexplicably her neutral expression, and Jughead wondered if he should make up an excuse and leave. 

The time he spent casually with Betty, sans Archie, was fairly limited. They saw each other a lot: they were both taking AP classes, and were co-editors (and basically the only dedicated writers for) the school newspaper. Both those things - the classes, the paper - they provided common ground that gave way to conversation naturally. The only other place he commonly saw Betty without Archie was in the bleachers at a Riverdale High football game, and he worried that those occasions were sufficient to exhaust them of all possible small talk. 

Before he could even come up with a somewhat plausible reason to leave, however, Betty said, “We may as well order,” and waved Pop over, and Jughead, ever hungry, was unable to resist temptation. He ordered a burger, fries, and a shake. 

When Pop left their table, Betty said, “Hey,” and then dug her teeth into her bottom lip. She hesitated for a moment and then confessed, “I’m kind of behind on readings for English. Would you mind if I read a little? Just until the food comes.” 

Jughead smiled slightly at her earnest expression. “Nerd,” he accused her gently, and then reached into his bag and pulled out his own copy of _Beowulf_. At the sight of her eyebrow creeping pointedly upward, he shrugged and let his smile grow. “I’m kind of behind, too.” 

They read until their burgers arrived, and then while they ate they talked about the epic poem, and about their English teacher, and about Archie’s girl-craziness, and about how the cafeteria had stopped selling the rocky road squares, that, it turned out, were a mutual favourite of theirs. After they were done eating and their glasses were almost empty, in a wordless agreement, they both shoved aside their plates and grabbed their books again, and Jughead slouched on his side of the booth, getting comfortable as he read with his book folded along its spine, while Betty flattened her book on the tabletop and started placing colour-coded sticky notes on its pages. 

Later that night, once she called goodbye to him over her shoulder as she ran out to her mother’s car, which was idling in the lot, Jughead put _Beowulf_ back in his bag and attempted to take stock of himself. His stomach was full, which was always a good feeling, but there was something more profound about his sense of contentment. He’d had a nice time hanging out with Betty, even without the presence of Archie Andrews and his blind enthusiasm and contagious laughter. The silences they’d shared had been comfortable, easy, imbued with something like understanding. 

For the first time since the month's moon began to wane, everything felt calm, felt still, if only for that moment, if only in that booth. 

 

 

 

Rose was, predictably, in the parlour. She turned away from the fireplace and walked toward them. She murmured something to Cheryl without stopping, her course set firmly for Jughead. When she was close enough, she gripped his chin in her hand. He could feel her bones through her skin, but her grasp was strong and unyielding. 

“Mon bébé,” she said quietly, her eyes narrowing as she looked at his face. In his peripheral vision, he saw Cheryl’s hair fly through the air, tossed irritably over her shoulder. “J’entends que tu ne te comportes pas.” 

“He doesn’t speak French, Nana.”

“Whose fault is that?” Jughead muttered. He tried to look at his mother, to turn toward her voice, but Rose still had his chin in her hand. 

Gladys’ hand landed on his back, and he tried not to flinch. “Il est là,” she said, and gave his back a little pat. “You’re here. That’s what matters.” 

His body was tense with all the effort it took to keep from trying to shake off Rose’s grip and his mother’s touch. “It’s not like I have a fucking choice,” he growled. “What am I going to do, change in the middle of campus?” 

Rose clicked her tongue disapprovingly and finally released him. “Forsythe. You are young; I understand. But you must _be_ here. Not only in your body.” 

_I’m in my body before anywhere else_ , he wanted to tell her. _I’m fucking trapped in it._

Her tongue clicked yet again, as though she’d read his mind. “Come,” she said, wrapping an arm around him with all the affection of a grandmother, guiding him toward the conservatory, from which other voices were emanating. “Come.”

 

 

 

It happened early. 

He was pissed when Rose sent them into the woods behind Thistle House in the early afternoon, after candelabras were lit and words were intoned in a language he barely knew and Cheryl and Jason entwined their arms and drank from chalices with contents that turned their mouths the colour of fresh blood, a shiny red gleam appearing on their perfect teeth in the flickering light. Despite his ignorance of nearly every word that Rose and her daughter-in-law, Penelope, spoke, his mother leaned forward only once to whisper a translation in his ear. 

“We will take Death’s proffered hand,” she murmured to him, and he had to close his eyes, because that voice, her voice - it had once read him bedtime stories, had whispered his nightmares away. “And we will hold it for a night.” 

Jughead choked on a laugh and angled his body as far away from hers as possible, so that he didn’t have to feel her breath on his skin. _Is this a goddamn_ Twilight _novel?_ he so badly wanted to ask. _Is this a first and terrible draft of a gothic novella by some young and misguided student who has only just discovered Horace Walpole or Mary Shelley? Cormac McCarthy, is this the transcript of one of your fever dreams? Cheryl, is this an excerpt from your diary?_

He choked on that laugh until tears stung his eyes, and then, he was sent to the woods. 

There, in the woods, he choked again, this time on all his previous derision, because it did happen early, earlier than ever before. His body sensed a moon his eyes could not yet see and began to tremble. 

Cheryl changed first, just as she had every month since he’d known her; she was never outdone, not even by her twin, who was a few minutes older. The shrill cry that left her lips turned into a howl that Jughead felt in his gut, and her body broke from the confines of her clothes, claws splitting out of her fingertips where nails once were, her back bowing, her body seeming to fold in on itself until she landed firmly on all four limbs, paws in the leaves, her eyes flashing as red as her lips had been only a moment before. 

She was beautiful, the most beautiful of them all, her coat long and silken and coppery. The sight of her like that always forced him to contemplate what he looked like as a wolf; he assumed his coat was dark, shaggy, maybe a little ragged. There was no way that he looked like her, like that. 

But then again: that was always his last thought, before his own throat cracked with an unintended cry. 

_There is no way that I am that._

 

 

 

He spent the subsequent night at Thistle House, his hunger somewhat satiated but his muscles thrumming with pain. His mother slipped into his room - which looked like it belonged in Mr. Rochester’s Thornfield Hall - late in the day on the first of November and held a crystal glass full of a bitter liquid to his lips. Once he finished it, she adjusted the pillows behind his head and ran her fingers soothingly through his hair, and he thought of her, for the first time in a long time, as _Mom_ rather than Gladys. 

He awoke the next morning when his mattress was jostled, and he opened his eyes to see Cheryl perched at the foot of his bed in her red negligee. 

“I’m getting really tired of seeing you first thing in the morning, Cheryl,” he said, rubbing his sore eyes. 

“Tired of moi? Impossible.” She crossed her legs, making herself comfortable. “I’m a sight for those tired eyes of yours.” She tilted her head and poked her lower lip out just a bit. “Ah, but you’d rather wake up with your little blonde _friend_ , wouldn’t you?” 

Jughead sat up in bed, and found himself surprised by the bark in his own voice when he said, “You have no reason to talk about her.” 

Cheryl smiled slowly. “Well, well. The baby has teeth now, does he?” Her hands inched along the bed toward him, fingers like the legs of a spider. “Yes, it looks like he does.” Her body followed her hands, leaning in closer to him as she braced her palms next to his thighs. “And you like it, don’t you, Forsythe? You don’t want to, but oh - you like it.” She ran her tongue slowly across her bottom lip. “The better to eat her with, hm?” she asked, practically cooing the words at him. 

His muscles went stiff. He’d never changed at will before, not like the others and especially not like Jason, who seemed to spend more of his time prowling through the forest than attending classes as a biped. But now, with Cheryl looking at him like she was, her faux-innocent eyes full of a challenge, he wanted to. His anger fuelled the craving in his body, and it took most of his strength to keep from surrendering to the temptation. 

“Back the hell off, Cheryl,” he said. “Or - ”

“ _Or_ ,” she mocked, but before he could finish his threat, she did back off, and stood, flouncing toward the door. One hand on the doorjamb, she turned back to him and said sweetly, “It was nice to have you spending Hallow’s Eve with us, Forsythe.” She smiled that predatory smile of hers. “Thanks for sharing that fawn with me. It was delicious.”

In spite of himself, Jughead winced. 

 

 

 

“Did you not sleep here last night?” Archie asked excitedly when Jughead stumbled back into their apartment, and then blinked, his expression shifting into something more cautious. “Hey, dude, are you okay?” 

“I stayed at my mom’s,” Jughead mumbled, and closed his bedroom door in Archie’s baffled face.

He ultimately lacked the courage to attend the English seminar Betty was also enrolled in, fearing the things he’d spot in her profile as he snuck glances her way, and ended up waiting outside the building for her instead. 

She walked down the steps with both straps of her pale blue backpack hooked over her shoulders and two library books in her arms. Her ponytail bounced with every step she took, and Jughead’s eyes followed the sight of it as she moved through the sea of students. He sucked in the deepest breath he could manage and hurried after her, calling, “Betty!” 

She turned her head at the sound of his voice but didn’t slow down, so he jogged to catch up with her, matching her brisk steps with his own. “Betty, hey,” he said softly once he was at her side. Looking at her, standing so close to her, all his carefully planned words and good intentions failed him, and he ended up blurting, “Uh, did you get my note?” 

Abruptly, she came to a stop, the movement so sudden that it left Jughead nearly skidding in his boots in an effort not to walk right by her, propelled by momentum. “Yes, Jughead,” she said in a flat voice, her eyes wide with hurt. “I got your note.” 

He could feel the corners of his mouth turn down. “Listen, Betty, I’m so sorry. It was a family emergency - ”

“And you couldn’t _wake me up_ to tell me?” she cut in, her wide eyes narrowing with the beginnings of a heated glare. 

“I know,” he said, full of regret. “I know. It was just so sudden, I didn’t have time - ”

“You had time to write a note but not time to wake me up.” She hugged her books to her chest, and he had the distinct impression that, were her books not in the way, she’d be crossing her arms and cocking one hip out in an eerie likeness of her mother. She took a small step closer to him and lowered her voice as she said, “You just _left_ me there. I had to sneak out of your apartment so that Archie wouldn’t see me and think we’d _had sex_ \- and god, I’m glad we didn’t, now that I know that this is how you act.” 

She was trying to conceal her emotions, but she wasn’t altogether successful, at least not under the scrutiny of eyes that had known her for more than a decade. It was right there in her face for him to read: she’d expected something different from him, something more, and he’d let her down. 

“Betts,” he sighed, hanging his head slightly. His fingers flexed with the urge to touch her. “I really am incredibly sorry. I know that what I did - it wasn’t okay.” He swallowed. “Did… did you have to wait a long time for Archie to leave, so that you could go?” The image of her laying in his bed, staring at the ceiling and filled with disappointment as she listened to Archie shuffle around the apartment before finally leaving for the gym, materialized in his head and began to haunt him. 

Betty pressed her lips together. “No, I - ” She looked at something behind his right shoulder. “I didn’t have to wait long.” 

“I didn’t want to leave like that,” he told her, promised her. “If I had any choice, I wouldn’t have. It was… a complicated situation, and I… ”

“Don’t, Juggie,” she said quietly. “Don’t tell me the story you’ve prepared. I _know_ you’re lying. I can see it. You look worn out, you look _sick_ , and you know that if you needed me, if you needed to talk to me, I’d… ” She trailed off and sighed, long and low. “If we were going to be something, we couldn’t lie to each other. We shouldn’t.” There was something pinched in her face, something tortured. “So it’s for the best, that we’re… not something.” 

“Betty,” he said, wanting to protest, but she’d already stepped back and was turning away. 

“I have Anthro,” she said, and took off across campus, leaving him staring after her like an idiot. 

 

 

 

Jughead brooded over their encounter on the quad for a full twenty-four hours, and then he hauled himself up off the couch and walked a few blocks to the nearest flower shop. He had no idea if it was the right move, but it was _a_ move, and after Mystery Date woke him up at six-thirty that morning with a loud notification encouraging him to contact his second-most-compatible match, he’d known that a move was the very thing he needed to make. 

“I need something that says ‘I screwed up and I’m really sorry,’” he told the florist, tugging his beanie down more firmly onto his head. 

The look on her face was knowing. “Yellow roses for apologies and friendship.”

“Friendship?” Jughead shoved his hands into his pockets. “Is there an apology flower that means…more than friendship?”

“Red for true love.” 

“What about pink?”

“Gratitude,” she told him. 

He decided it would do, and took his wallet out. “Yellow and pink, please.” 

 

 

 

Several dollars poorer and bouquet in hand, he trekked across town and through campus to Thornhill Hall. He slipped in the doors after a couple of freshman absorbed in conversation with each other, and headed upstairs to Betty’s room. Her door was still sporting spooky decor. 

He looked right into the eyes of a friendly ghost, lifted his fist, and knocked. 

 

(to be continued...)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So between Jughead's repeated lone wolf references, Betty's attempts to protect Kevin from ~~the forest~~ himself, and ETHEL MUGGS being the gal almost getting into trouble for walking home alone at night, episode 2x03 was oddly reassuring re: this superhero/werewolf fic.
> 
> Thank you, everyone, for the response to this story so far! I hope you're still with us on this wild ride.

It wasn’t that Betty disliked her body. She had simply learned to be protective of it. Protective, and a little afraid. 

Some of that came, of course, from growing up female in the particular world she lived in. Some of it came from growing up female with Alice Cooper for a mother, which was like being battered by a tsunami of contradictory messages that in the long view of social pressures made perfect sense, but in the short view of standing in front of a floor-length mirror at fifteen years old merely seemed like so many impossibilities. She was supposed to be strong but without excess flesh or even muscle, confident but not cocky, pretty to look at but not sexual. The lines were frustratingly thin—in fact, they were so thin as to be transparent, which Betty thought even before she realized that she herself could be transparent too. 

So she had taught herself to always be in charge. She learned to control when people saw her and when they did not, and she learned to control what they saw. She learned exactly what to wear in order to seem friendly and approachable, but not approachable in _that way_ ; she learned exactly how much makeup was required for the so-called natural look; she learned how to walk and talk and smile so that people noticed her, but not too much. Never too much. 

Sometimes it was frustrating as hell, the fact that she was so good at making herself unnoticed, overlooked, even when she remained visible. Blending in had simply become natural to her, automatic; it was like breathing. She supposed Superman grew inured to the weight of Clark Kent’s glasses across the bridge of his nose, supposed that sometimes he felt naked when he shed his disguise to reveal the blue tights and red underwear. 

And if sometimes her body secretly burned with what she knew (but refused to acknowledge) was desire, well… she taught herself how to take care of that too. 

Because the thing was, when people either could not or chose not to see you, you saw them. The minute Betty Cooper began using her invisibility for good, she’d started seeing a lot more of the worst sides of humanity than she’d ever wanted to. It was enough to make her trust people a little less, to trust men a little less, even to trust her own instincts a little less. 

Sometimes she wondered if that was a bad thing, if she’d backed herself into some sort of inescapable feedback loop. She had still never had sex, and though she’d kissed a couple of guys, even gone as far as heavy petting, she hadn’t much enjoyed the experiences. They had been fine, sure, but nothing to write home about. Nothing to make her want more. 

Which was why it had been such a surprise to her when her body tugged her in the direction of Jughead— _Jughead_ , of all people; Jughead, who had almost certainly never thought about _her_ until a dating app told him he should—and then practically ignited under his touch. 

He had surprisingly great hands. She found herself looking at them now, just on the other side of her threshold, his fingers crinkling into cellophane that was wrapped around the stems of two dozen pink and yellow roses. 

Slowly, Betty let her gaze travel over the flowers, over the brown fleece jacket she’d borrowed just the weekend before, over the lips she half wished she’d never felt on hers, up to two blue eyes—one half-concealed under that permanently shaggy bit of hair, both clouded with an emotion she didn’t care to try and parse right now. She was glad his current "S" t-shirt wasn't the one she had woken up in, alone; _that_ would have been too much.

“Oh, _honestly_ , Jughead,” she said, and then she tried to slam the door in his face. 

But it didn’t slam. It didn’t even shut. Jughead had managed to wedge his boot against the frame, like he thought this was a movie where that kind of move actually worked. 

They stood there for a moment, toe to toe. She folded her arms over her chest in a half-conscious imitation of her mother. A muscle in her jaw flexed, seemingly of its own accord. 

Something in Jughead seemed to snap. His whole upper body sagged, and he let out a brief, soft sigh. 

“Okay.” He swallowed once, licked his lips, and nodded. “Okay.” He withdrew his foot. She closed the door, but gently. 

Five minutes later, there was another knock at her door. This time she opened it to find one of her freshmen, Alissa, on the other side. Alissa, too, was holding a bouquet of pink and yellow roses. 

“Someone left these outside your door,” she chirped, her face a large and hopeful grin, like she couldn't _wait_ to run to the common room and announce that their RA had a secret admirer. 

Betty took the flowers. “Thanks, Alissa.” 

There was something to be said for having Alice Cooper for a mother, sometimes, Betty thought as she dug around at the back of her closet. For one, she knew exactly what message pink and yellow roses was supposed to send. For another, though she had never needed it before, she was probably the only student on campus who had a vase in her dorm room. She trimmed the end of each stem, emptied a water bottle into the vase, added the packet of flower food that she found lurking in the cellophane, and finally, after she’d arranged all the blooms in an aesthetically pleasing fashion, opened the card. 

It didn’t contain much of a message, just the words _I’m sorry, Betty_ and a little doodle of a crown. She crumpled the card into a ball and threw it in the trash. 

Then she tore the Halloween decorations off her bedroom door, and threw those away too.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She was a sophomore in high school when she found out.

 _I want to disappear_ , Betty thought one afternoon, before she slipped through the front door. 

Betty had been thinking _I want to disappear_ more and more often as of late. 

Technically, she had been the first Cooper sister to put a dent in the armor that was their carefully curated perfect girl next door image, by failing to make the cheerleading squad in either her freshman or sophomore years. It was ironic, in a way, since being a cheerleader was the one part of the image that she wanted for herself, and the one part that Polly—now a senior, and captain of the squad—could have given her. Sometimes Betty wondered if she was really _that_ bad, or if Polly simply wanted to keep the entire portion of positive attention that came with being a cheerleader for herself.

That was before Polly dumped the captain of the football team and replaced him with a tall drink of water from the south side of town. Her new boyfriend bore a Southside Serpents jacket and the ludicrous moniker of Sweet Pea. Polly set metaphorical fire to their mother’s façade; Sweet Pea, Betty was pretty sure, had set literal fire to at least one car. 

Betty had already called and informed her mother that she would be staying late at school today to work on the _Blue & Gold_, a story she knew no one would question, and that she was headed to Pop’s with Kevin after his wrestling practice. In fact, Kevin did not have wrestling practice, and Betty planned to work on the paper from her bedroom. It was just nice to be in her own space without anyone thinking she was home, and consequently trying to bother her. 

Her peace and quiet lasted exactly ten minutes. Then Polly arrived home, and the screaming match began. Thankfully, Betty was able to block most of it out with a combination of headphones and extreme concentration.

Suddenly, even through headphones, her sister’s voice was crystal clear. 

“You’re probably _glad_ this happened, just so you can say you were right!” Polly screamed, just before she ran up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door.

“Polly!” came her mother’s voice, equally infuriated.

Heaving sobs began emanating from Polly’s bedroom, and Betty wondered what the hell had happened. She snuck out of her own bedroom and down the stairs, where she found her mother slumped over the kitchen table, massaging her temples. Amidst the usual afternoon clutter—newspapers, mail, Alice’s third cup of coffee—Betty spotted something that did not belong on the table at all, and not just because it was unsanitary.

A pregnancy test. A _used_ pregnancy test. She couldn’t tell, from this distance, whether it was positive or negative. 

Alice reached out a hand for her cell phone, started to dial Betty’s father, then apparently thought better of it and hung up. She rose, looking twenty years older than she had when Betty got home that afternoon, and ascended the stairs.

Betty followed at a slight distance, hardly daring to breathe.

“Polly,” Alice said, mostly to the doorknob. “Polly, please open the door. We need to—”

“I don’t want to talk to you about this!” Polly screamed.

Alice sighed deeply, but stood rigidly upright. “You realize these drugstore sticks are not infallible, I hope? How late are you?” 

“And you just jumped to the conclusion that it was mine! How do you know that’s not Betty’s?” 

Alice scoffed, and Betty felt several prickles of irritation despite the fact that everyone knew Polly had a boyfriend and she had never even kissed anyone. 

“You _went through my trash_ , Mother.” 

“We need to have a conversation about your options.” Alice’s voice was even, measured—but, Betty thought, kinder than usual. “At the very least, you need to take another test in a few days. And we need to talk about being safe in the future. I don’t want you...”

The bedroom door creaked open to reveal Polly’s blotchy, tear-stained face, her eyes narrowed into slits. “You don’t want me seeing him again.” 

“Of course I don’t, but I don't want you to be careless about these things, either,” Alice said. She reached for her daughter—who flinched—and began stroking her hair, as though Polly was still a small child. She sighed deeply. “Sometimes, Polly, you remind me a little too much of myself at your age.” 

In the end, Betty did meet up with Kevin at Pop’s that night. She had to. After listening in on the subsequent conversation between Polly and her mother, she simply had to get out of the house.

His eyes were enormous, and not just with jealousy over her burger and milkshake (both of which were forbidden to him until wrestling season was over).

“That is _wild_. Wild, Betty.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Your mom really has no idea what happened to him?”

“No. It was a closed adoption. She’ll never know anything unless he tries to contact her.”

Kevin shook his head, spread his hands on the table, and shook his head again.

“It’s too bad.” His voice was almost wistful. “Look at you, look at Polly… to think there’s a young, hot, _male_ version of you gals somewhere in the world, and I’ll never get to meet him.”

“ _Kevin_!” Betty shrieked, leaning across the table to swat him. 

He raised his eyebrows suggestively. “A boy can dream,” he said, and she dissolved in giggles. 

She hadn’t been close to her sister since Polly started high school and fell in with the mean girl crowd. But that night, Polly snuck into her bedroom and curled up next to her. It felt almost like old times, like Betty was still afraid of things that went bump in the night. She woke up around three when Polly got out of bed. 

“Go back to sleep,” Polly whispered, so Betty promptly rolled over and did just that. 

In the morning, she found a tampon wrapper in the bathroom wastepaper basket and a pair of Polly’s blood-stained underwear soaking in the sink.

  
  
  
  
  
  


There was no avoiding Jughead entirely, of course, not even if she wanted to—which she didn’t, not really. Their friendship had waxed and waned over the years, sure, but even at its dimmest, even at the times it was most filtered through Archie, it had always been there. She had always known that if she really needed Jughead—to pick up an emergency article for the school paper when someone else flaked on her, to drive her home from Pop’s if it suddenly started to rain and Archie was headed elsewhere, to make sure she didn’t have to endure the embarrassing sting of being dateless at her own senior prom—he would be there. 

And she had believed, truly, that he thought the same of her, which she thought might be about half of why this hurt so much. 

She was not trying to avoid him entirely, or forever. She just needed some time to process, and that involved avoiding him as much as possible for now. 

What, exactly, was the protocol for this kind of situation? How were you supposed to react after making out with your childhood friend and spending half the night spooning only to wake up alone in his bed with only an unsatisfactory note to explain where he'd gone? It struck her that Veronica might have an opinion (or three), but she couldn’t bring this up with Veronica. She couldn’t bring it up with Kevin, either, not after the way he’d reacted to a date he had thought was meaningless. And she definitely couldn’t say anything to Archie. 

By this point in the semester, the seating arrangements in their English seminar were rigidly codified; moving across the room, _not_ taking the seat next to Jughead’s, seemed an impossibility. But Betty deliberately did not look at him, instead scooting her chair a few inches closer to Melody Valentine. 

(Chuck Clayton had returned to their class, wearing a rather sour expression.) 

At the end of class, as she ducked to tuck her laptop back into her bag, she heard a soft “Betty?” in her ear. 

Something in her stomach furled and unfurled. 

“Not now,” she muttered back. Then she pasted a big smile on her face and sat up. “Melody, want to grab coffee?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The minute she turned eighteen, Polly abandoned them for a ramshackle house on the south side. Betty still saw her at school (somehow, she'd avoided having to transfer), where she walked the halls looking much the same, save a sultry swing to her hips that sent her River Vixens skirt into near-scandalous motion. 

One day she crept up behind Polly in the girls’ bathroom, her reflection in the mirror blurred as she focused on her sister’s application of dark crimson lipstick. 

“Please come home, Polly,” she said, her quiet voice still reverberating off the old tile walls. “We miss you. _I_ miss you.” 

Polly scoffed. “Did Mom put you up to this?” 

“No.” 

It was true. Her parents didn’t even mention Polly anymore, having chosen to handle this little family issue by writing a series of scathing exposés on the south side’s gang problems. 

“I have my own life now,” Polly said. “You’re just going to have to accept that, okay? Stop acting like you can wrap everything back up and put a perfect bow on top.” 

Betty reached out to touch Polly’s arm, only to have her hand brushed away. She wanted to scream _You think I like this life?_ in her sister’s face, but instead she took a step backwards and tried to keep her voice steady. 

“Are you happy?” 

Polly left the bathroom without answering.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Finally, the next weekend, Betty decided she would just go for it. 

_I want to disappear_ , she thought, as Ethel Muggs stepped out of the library not long after ten o’clock on Friday night. It was the fourth time this week. 

This wasn’t something she had tried before. It wasn’t something she had ever wanted to try. After all, the fact that it could be dangerous for women to walk around by themselves after dark was hardly Ethel’s fault. But it _was_ sometimes dangerous for women to walk around by themselves after dark. Ethel knew that, or ought to, and Betty was only one person. So until such time as she could split herself in two, or completely rid the world of bad people… well, this was really more a question of resource management than anything else. 

“Why are you even studying right now, Ethel?” she whispered to herself. It was Friday night. Even Betty didn’t study on Friday nights. 

(Then again, she was doing _this_ on Friday night, which probably wasn’t any better. But Veronica would be with Archie, and Melody had plans with her friend Josie, so…) 

She trailed Ethel until they were just out of the zone patrolled by campus security. Then she took a deep breath and rushed past the other girl, reaching out to give Ethel’s messenger bag a tug as she ran by. 

Ethel let out a little shriek. “What was that? Who’s there?” she cried softly. 

The night provided a satisfying and perfectly timed howl of wind, which was the only answer Ethel got. She picked up her pace. Betty remained close on her heels. Tonight, she slipped in the front door of Ethel’s apartment building and saw her all the way upstairs, not leaving until she had overheard enough to ensure that Ethel was only shaken, not truly traumatized. 

Only when she’d reached the sidewalk again did her stomach start clenching in knots. 

_I did the right thing_ , she told herself. _I did_. 

Her stomach did not unclench. 

She was going to pass within a block of her usual coffee shop anyway, so she took a slight detour, intending to get a peppermint tea. Inside the coffee shop, the air was thick with cinnamon; a sign on the counter announced the presence of hot apple cider. Betty knew she would probably regret drinking something that sugary right before bed, but she couldn’t resist. 

At this hour, most of the tables were empty. But as she stood waiting for her drink to emerge, she spotted a familiar figure in the corner, hunched over his laptop with a ceramic coffee mug in hand. She watched him type one-handed, scowling at the screen as though it had personally offended him. 

The corner of her mouth twitched, as though it intended to smile without her permission. 

“Order for Betty,” called the barista.

Even at the sound of her name—she was pretty sure she was the only Elizabeth in Goldspire Falls going by Betty, or at least the only one who’d be out and about at this hour—Jughead did not look up. She grabbed her cider and left. 

A few minutes later, she heard her phone receive a text. Not wanting to juggle a drink, a phone, and gloves, she waited until she was back in her room before looking. 

There were actually two messages: one regular text, one notification from Mystery Date. She opened the app first. It showed her a message from her fourth most compatible match. 

_S: Hey, babe. What’s up?_

She rolled her eyes and blocked S.’s profile without a second thought. Then she opened her texts. Her thumb hesitated for a moment over the small profile picture at the left edge, the one that showed dark hair and a gray knit hat. 

_Everything all right? You seemed upset._

She held the phone in her left hand and tapped the surface of her desk with the fingers of her right. 

_I’m fine,_ she responded. 

Three gray dots appeared. After a moment, they solidified into a simple _Okay_. 

She pulled her diary from the top drawer of her desk and wrote until her hand went numb.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You’ve been avoiding me,” said Archie, a week later, as he squeezed next to her on an old loveseat at the back of the coffee shop. The Pussycats were about to play a Saturday night showcase, and they had enough of a following for the space to be unusually crowded; since Betty was now friends with two of the four band members, there was no way she was getting out of this one. And since it was so crowded... “You’ve also been avoiding Veronica.” 

“No, I haven’t,” Betty protested. “I’ve just been busy with school, and work, and...” 

“Dating?” 

Betty shook her head. “Definitely not that.” 

Archie’s brow furrowed. “Really? Veronica’s, like, ninety-nine percent sure you have a secret hot hookup you’re not telling her about, and that’s why you never answer texts at night.” 

“Veronica gets a lot of ideas,” Betty muttered. Naturally, Archie had managed to share this theory at the precise moment her one-time-only secret hot hookup, and the person she _had_ been avoiding, arrived bearing one of those cardboard drink holders. 

She dropped her gaze to her hands. The recent extra late nights were starting to do a number on them. While the skin on her palms was still unbroken, it was starting to look a little rough. Worse still were her knuckles; she preferred not to wear gloves when she worked, and her best hand lotion was no match for November in New England. 

“Well, we miss you at the apartment,” Archie said, as he accepted a soda from Jughead’s tray. “Right, Jug?” 

A paper cup floated into her peripheral vision, held aloft by a hand she’d been trying not to think about. 

“Every minute you’re not there,” Jughead said; even though she was usually pretty good at reading him, she couldn’t tell whether or not he was being sarcastic. One long finger tapped the middle of the cup’s lid as the cup itself was tilted slightly in her direction. “That’s for you,” he added, when she didn’t take it. 

“I didn’t ask for anything.” She looked up, though, and saw one corner of Jughead’s mouth turned up in a sad half-smile. 

“I know.” 

“If this is espresso, I’ll be up all night,” she said, as she accepted the cup. She then immediately almost spilled its contents all over herself, despite the lid, when Archie jumped to his feet. 

“I gotta wish Veronica good luck again before they go on.” He glanced around at the crowds. “Jughead, save my seat, will you?” 

To Jughead’s credit, he tried calling after Archie—but Archie, of course, either didn’t hear him or pretended not to. 

“Just sit,” Betty said, rolling her eyes. “The vultures are already circling.” 

Jughead sat. Despite the tight fit, he did his best not to inadvertently touch her. “Sorry,” he muttered, when their thighs brushed. 

She knew there was nothing he could do about it, though, so she shrugged and took a sip of her drink—which turned out to be hot apple cider again, and so delicious she didn’t even mind that she’d almost burned her tongue. 

Archie never did come back for his seat. At least it was loud enough that Jughead didn’t really try to talk to her. She just… felt his presence. 

At the end of the gig, they both stood up. Betty twisted a little, trying to stretch out her upper back, and Jughead picked up their empty paper mugs. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him lick his lips. “Betty…” 

“I’m going to the ladies’ room.” 

Jughead nodded. 

“And I told Melody and Valerie I would help them with their gear,” she added. She had not, in fact, told them this, but she was sure the girls would appreciate an extra pair of hands. 

He got the message. “Get home safe, Betts,” he said.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” 

Betty’s head jerked up. Cheryl Blossom stood behind her in the restroom, red hair gleaming brilliantly even in the yellowish fluorescent lighting. 

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” she said, which was entirely true at the moment. 

Cheryl’s lips spread into a soft, dangerous smile. “Oh, don’t act so innocent, Elizabeth. You’re not quite a wolf in sheep’s clothing, of course, but we both know there’s more to you than meets the eye.” 

Betty turned off the faucet and reached for a paper towel. “You don’t know me at all.” 

“Clichéd, but true from your perspective, I suppose,” Cheryl drawled. 

She took a step closer, and Betty, unable to back away more than half a step thanks to the sink, registered the click of stiletto heels on the tiled floor. A pale finger, tipped in a perfectly manicured, blood-red claw, tapped just above Betty’s heart. 

“I very much dislike having to involve myself in other people’s affairs,” Cheryl said. “But since Jughead seems incapable of controlling himself and you’re incapable of taking a hint, I’m just going to say it. For both your sakes, stay away from him.” 

The bathroom became a whirl of red hair and expensive perfume, and then—just like that—Cheryl Blossom was gone. 

_I want to disappear_ , Betty thought, and she was gone too.

  
  
  
  
  
  


By now, the crowd had thinned out enough that Betty could immediately tell Cheryl Blossom wasn’t hanging around inside. She snuck out the back door of the coffee shop and ran through a side alley, emerging in front of the building just in time to see Jughead raise a hand to Archie and Veronica in farewell. He turned and stalked off into the darkness. 

She would just call Jughead later, like a normal person, and ask if they could talk. She wasn’t going to follow him. She wasn’t.

Her resolve lasted only until she saw a slim, pale, redheaded figure emerge from the shadows and go after him. And, well, there was really no reason not to follow _Jason_. 

The wind blew into her face. She ducked her head ever so slightly and soldiered on. 

Jughead walked straight back to the old brownstone that housed the apartment he shared with Archie, never once taking his eyes off the sidewalk in front of his feet. He went inside, and a few minutes later, a light turned on in the second-story window Betty knew to be his bedroom. Though the night was quite chilly—threatening to snow, even—he cracked the window open a few inches. 

(He had opened the window an inch or so the night they'd spent together, too, and she had welcomed the sharp, crisp air as an excuse to snuggle slightly closer to him.)

She expected Jason would ring the doorbell or call Jughead’s phone or something along those lines, but no. Some large bushes lined the first floor of the building, and Jason slipped into these, melting into the shadows as though he’d been born from them. Only a tiny bit of floodlight spilling onto his red hair gave any indication that he was there at all, and if Betty hadn’t known where to look, she never would have noticed him.

What was _up_ with the Blossoms? 

Wind still blowing in her face, she glanced around and realized there was nowhere to hide from the wind (or from people who might unknowingly walk right into her) _except_ the bushes. And, while she knew Jason wouldn’t be able to see her, her skin prickled at the thought of getting that close to him. 

She sat down on the front stairs of the brownstone next door, hugged her knees into her chin, and waited for Jason Blossom to make a move. 

The wind shifted, swirling almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees. _Thank goodness_ , Betty thought; unpleasant though it still was, at least it was hitting her back now, instead of her face. The only disadvantage was that now she knew exactly many strands of hair had dislodged themselves from her ponytail. She twisted around, facing the wind once more, just for long enough to tidy her hair. 

She should never have taken her eyes off the bushes. 

When she turned around again, she let out an involuntary gasp. Jason Blossom’s face was inches from hers, almost ghostly in the dim street lighting. Even over the wind, she could hear his breaths, short and irregular. She was still invisible. With a sinking feeling, she had the sudden thought that he could _smell_ her. 

But that wasn’t possible, was it? 

Her heart was pounding so hard that she didn’t even notice a second figure had approached them, not until two familiar hands grabbed Jason by the collar and pulled him roughly aside. 

“What the fuck, Jason,” Jughead growled. He dragged Jason off the front steps and began speaking to him in a low voice, so low that his words were inaudible. 

Slowly, Betty got to her feet. Her knees and ankles were stiff with cold, and on top of that, she was shaking from head to toe. Whether that was due to the temperature or to fear, she couldn’t say. 

Now was the time to escape, though, if she was going to do it. If she could just get around the nearest street corner… 

She made it about halfway down the block. 

“Betty?” Jughead’s voice wavered through the night. She paused and looked back. Jason Blossom was gone, and Jughead, somehow, had decided to stumble in exactly the direction she was going. “Betty, where—if Jason, if he—goddamn it, this is all my fault.” 

He ripped off his beanie, ran a hand through his hair, and looked _right at her_. 

“I know you’re here somewhere. Will you please just—we don’t have to talk or anything, but please, Betts—” His voice was ragged now, almost desperate. “I need to know you’re okay.” 

Betty looked around. The next building over had a front staircase large enough to crouch behind, so she darted over and did just that. Then she dug her fingernails into her palms. 

Heart pounding, she stood up. “I’m fine,” she said, and she saw Jughead’s eyes fill with relief. 

“Thank god.” He seemed to hesitate for a moment, his weight shifting from one foot to another. “Let’s get you a Lyft back to the dorm.” 

She nodded. 

As she stepped closer to him, she realized that Jughead—who was not wearing a coat—was nevertheless emitting an insane amount of body heat. She let her body draw her closer and closer to his warmth until Jughead muttered, “Oh, god, you’re freezing,” and slowly, cautiously, slid an arm around her shoulders. 

She wished this didn’t feel so _right_ : the weight of his arm across her back, the drift of his fingertips across her upper arm. Because something, something more than weird commitment issues, was seriously _wrong_. 

A decision needed to be made, though, and so she made one. 

“Jughead?” 

He looked down at her, one eyebrow raised, and she realized he’d never put his hat back on. It was still crumpled in his left hand. 

“Can I come in?” She took a deep breath. Whether or not this was a _good_ decision, she had no idea. “I know you said we don’t have to talk, but... I want to.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


(to be continued...)

  
  
  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for taking so long to get this chapter out. 
> 
> If any werewolves out there have tips for Jughead regarding how to break that news to the girl you're into, he'd appreciate it if you'd hit him up.

“Of course you can come in,” Jughead said. Betty was cold as ice against his chest, her pale pink peacoat clearly not doing much to block out the wind, which was whipping the smaller branches of the trees that lined the sidewalk around violently. 

He’d smelled her. In that wind, he’d smelled her, all those distinctly _Betty_ scents he’d come to know throughout his life.

He did not know what had made him stand up from his bed, where he’d been flicking through Netflix options on his laptop, and go back over to his window. He couldn’t say what had called him there - it was a strong but undesirable possibility that he _felt_ Jason, but he thought it equally possible that he’d just had a gut feeling that something was off, the kind of unsettled sensation that even normal people got. 

When he looked out the window, he saw Jason leaning down over the steps of the brownstone next door, bent over at such a sharp angle that he was nearly on all fours, looking eerily animalistic. And once he ran downstairs, grabbed Jason by the collar of his obscenely expensive coat, and yelled at him - though ‘bark’ might, admittedly, have been a better descriptor for the sounds that were coming out of his mouth - he looked up and down the street and everywhere, all around him, in every gust of wind, he smelled Betty Cooper. 

Her perfume, which he had grown familiar with over the past couple years, smelled softly of citrus and fresh roses and hints of musky vanilla. Betty, beneath the perfume, smelled like a laundry detergent that probably had a name like _Summer Rain_ , like the slightest tang of hand cream containing glycerin, like she’d pulled oatmeal cookies out of the oven in the recent past. She smelled like his childhood: freshly cut grass in the Andrews’ backyard, Pop Tate’s greasy fries and vinyl booths, like a stack of newspapers. She smelled like the scent she’d left on the sheets he had yet to bring himself to wash, like she had that night when she looked at him like _he_ , Jughead Jones, of all the people and things in the world, was exactly what she wanted, that night when her hair got tangled against his pillow and she hooked one of her legs up around his hips, pressing them closer in a way that had them sighing against each other’s mouths. She smelled, simultaneously, like a Betty he knew and a Betty he desperately wanted to know more of. 

 

 

 

In the apartment, he steered Betty to the couch, sat her down, unbuttoned her coat, slid it off her shoulders, and tucked the throw blanket Mary Andrews had given them at some point firmly around her. He gave her upper arms one last warming rub and then dropped down to perch on the coffee table in front of her. 

Betty was still blinking in mild, bemused confusion by the time he was done. She poked the fingers of one hand out from underneath the blanket in order to hold it in place around herself. “Thanks, Mom,” she said in a slow voice that was almost teasing. 

He winced, grabbed his beanie from where he’d tossed it next to her on the couch, and shoved it onto his head. “I know you’re pissed at me, but I don’t know if an Alice Cooper comparison is deserved.” 

Her expression shifted, turning somber. “I am mad at you,” she agreed. Something about those words tugged at his memory, a flicker of a tiny blonde girl with fists on her hips, _I’m mad at you, Juggie_ \- he probably didn’t deal with it very well then, either. “But I’m ready to… hear you out, I guess.” She glanced down the hall. “Arch isn’t home, right?” 

“Yeah, no. He went to Veronica’s.” 

“Good.” She tugged the blanket tight around her shoulders. “We can talk. Really talk.” 

Her face was full of determination, the stubborn streak he knew so well evident the way her lips pressed together, the way her chin tilted upward. Jughead wanted to skip to the part where he took her face in his hands and kissed her. He wanted to skip right out of his life and into a universe where kissing Betty was uncomplicated. 

With a quiet sigh, he got to his feet. “Want some cocoa?” 

“That sounds nice.” Looking like she wanted to get up, she added, “I can make it.” 

“Betty.” He levelled her with a look. “I can use a kettle.” 

A little smile snuck onto her face, and his stupid, hopeful heart did a somersault, several backflips, and slammed itself, hard, against his ribs. 

 

 

 

Gladys left when he was thirteen. Jellybean was only seven. 

She had always been flaky, his mother. She seemed unable to hold down a job, she would vanish for stints of time and offer no explanation upon her return, and she would get a faraway look in her eyes sometimes that Jughead found so difficult to understand that he found it almost frightening. 

She was flaky, but he never doubted that she loved him. She was not the kind of mother who waited eagerly for stories about his day at school and cooked a balanced meal every night, but she did stay up until dawn cutting tiny stars out of construction paper for his poster for the science fair, and she always said she was full halfway through a milkshake and let him finish the rest, and when she tucked him in at night and pressed her lips firmly to her forehead, he felt untouchable, like the blanket she laid over him was a shield against the world. 

It was only when she left that doubt began to sneak in. The first couple days of her absence were unremarkable, but by the fifth day his father was pacing through their small house with the phone in his hand and a cigarette between his teeth, and Jellybean was weeping on the other side of the thin wall that separated their bedrooms. 

His mother did not come home. Not for three years. 

 

 

 

He poured hot cocoa for Betty into their very best mug, the one that only had a single tiny chip, and took a mug with a thin crack sneaking down its side for himself. When he handed Betty the cup, she cradled it in her hands, a slight furrow appearing between her brows. It occurred to him, as he took his perch on the coffee table again, that she looked like someone at the end of a movie, wrapped in a blanket with a warm beverage. She was in the pose of someone who’d encountered the monsters and seen them defeated; it made the situation feel backwards, upside down, because she was still blissfully unaware of the B-movie plot he sometimes felt like he lived in. 

“I’m sorry about Jason,” he said softly, his voice a little gruff. “He’s a creep.” 

“I don’t understand how he - ” Betty looked down into her mug. He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. 

Tentatively, he touched her knee. “Betts, I’m so sorry about that night. That morning. What happened between us - ”

“What happened between us started with Mystery Date.” She inched her knee away and sighed. “It said we were compatible, and I sort of started to believe it. But that app only knows what you tell it, and I… I don’t know if I’m ninety-two percent compatible with you, Jughead. Maybe I’m that compatible with F, with the version of you I got matched with, but in reality… something’s going on with you. I’ve known you for almost my whole life, I know you way better than any app ever could, but now I’m wondering if I do really know you.” She glanced away and bit her lower lip briefly. “Maybe you’re not the person I thought I could be with.” 

Jughead’s chest clenched, and he set down his mug, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “You do know me. Of course you do. There are just things - there are some things I don’t know how to put into words. But they have nothing to do with you. Or with us.” He paused, watching her face closely. “If there is an us.” 

She met his gaze again, a sheen over her eyes. “You hurt me.” 

He squeezed his own eyes shut for half a second. “I know. I didn’t want to.”

“Archie didn’t know anything about you having any kind of family emergency.” 

“I don’t tell Archie everything.” 

“Do you tell _anyone_ everything?” 

He lifted an eyebrow but kept his tone gentle as he asked, “Do you?” 

Her eyes dropped from his. She sipped her cocoa and licked a smudge of chocolate from the corner of her mouth. 

“Maybe we can start over,” Jughead proposed softly, unable to keep from staring at her lips. 

“Can we start over with honesty?” 

He sat up and tugged his beanie off, pushing away the hair that immediately fell into his eyes. “Betty - ”

“I thought you might have a secret girlfriend, but that didn’t really seem right. Not unless that secret girlfriend is Cheryl Blossom.” 

“Jesus.” He could feel his scowl settle into every line of his face. “No. Cheryl’s just - ”

“A friend of the family?” Betty asked, her left eyebrow creating an impressive arch that cast doubt on excuses he hadn’t yet made. “What was her brother doing _hiding in the bushes_ outside your window? Juggie, _what_ is going on?” 

He shook his head, scrubbing his hand over his face. “I can’t tell you.”

“Are you in trouble?” She leaned forward and set her mug down next to his. The blanket fell from her shoulders, but she didn’t bother gathering it around herself again. “I’m worried about you. You’ve seemed so… I don’t know, _tortured_ , lately.” 

He tried to force his mouth into a cavalier half-smile. “That’s just my aesthetic.” 

“Jughead.” 

“I can’t, Betts. And even if I could, you wouldn’t believe me.” 

Her eyes seemed to dance, a ferocious kind of resolve warring with desperation so acute it lodged a lump in his throat. “Try me.” 

 

 

 

Gladys returned in mid-October, as the moon waxed in the days after his sixteenth birthday. She showed up to the trailer his family had relocated to without ceremony, as though she’d merely been at the grocery store or on some other casual errand. 

It was a completely normal Wednesday. Jughead was helping Jellybean with her homework when there was a knock on the door. When he saw his mother through the peephole, all the air felt as though it had been sucked from his lungs. His hand seemed to take a long time to find the doorknob. 

She was holding a large box wrapped in paper printed with colourful balloons. Behind him, Jellybean said, “ _Mommy?_ ” in a voice pitched high with emotion, but Gladys’ eyes were intent on Jughead’s face as she held the box out toward him. “Happy birthday, sweetheart.” 

His mother called a few times a year and turned every question he asked her back around on him, inquiring about school and his friends and his part-time job at the drive-in. She hadn’t gone that far, only to Glenspire Falls, but she never suggested a visit. Jughead followed her lead on the matter, terrified of the possibility that she’d reject the idea or evade his proposition - he wasn’t sure which would be worse. She was living with her mother, the maternal grandmother he had no memory of meeting, and who died when he was fifteen. _Will Mommy come home now?_ Jellybean had asked, her eyes heartbreakingly wide and solemn in the blue light that emanated from the television. Jughead didn’t believe in lying to his sister, so he told her, _I don’t think so_. And he was right. 

Or, at least, he was right until their mother reappeared on their doorstep with a gift in her hands. 

Gladys hugged Jellybean and murmured a series of mollifying phrases while Jughead unwrapped the box. His hands felt numb as he ripped the paper. He pulled out the object within and turned to his mother. “A sleeping bag?” 

She smiled. He couldn’t figure out if her smile was the smile he remembered, the smile of a woman who’d loved him, despite her faults. “We’re going camping. For your birthday.” 

Jellybean lit up. “Me too?” 

“No, sweet girl,” Gladys said, running her fingers through Jellybean’s hair. “Sixteen is a special age. You’ll have to wait your turn.” She lifted her eyes to Jughead’s baffled face, her expression smooth and calm. “You should pack your things. Bring warm clothes and your toothbrush.”

He stared at her. “You want to go camping _tonight_?” 

“Yes.”

“What? No. No. It’s a Wednesday. I have homework. Dad’s not home - who’s going to take care of Jelly?” 

“Why don’t you go call your best friend and ask if you can go to her house for a couple hours,” Gladys said to his sister. “Say that your parents have to do something important.” 

“On a school night?” Jellybean asked, caught between delight and uncertainty, but Gladys was already nudging her toward the living room, where their landline was. 

Jughead frowned at his mother so hard that it hurt. “You don’t even know her best friend’s name. We haven’t seen you in _three years_. You think I’m going to go camping with you?” He shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “Hell no.” 

His mother crossed her legs, seemingly unbothered by the rage he was struggling to contain. “It’s a gift, sweetheart. Don’t be rude.” 

“ _You_ want to talk to _me_ about being _rude_?” he demanded, the timbre of his voice sinking low, into something akin to a growl. 

“Come on this little trip with me,” Gladys said. “And we’ll talk. You can say everything you’ve been dying to say. I’ll listen. And I’ll explain some things to you, too.” 

He hesitated for an instant but then shook his head again. “No, this is ridiculous. I’m not leaving Jellybean. And anyway, I’m feeling kind of weird, so I don’t think I should go anywhere.” He swallowed. “I don’t want this, Mom.” 

Gladys rose from her chair and walked over to him. She laid her hand on his forearm. “Forsythe,” she said. Slowly, her grip tightened, her fingers digging into his skin. The strength of her grasp, the intensity in her eyes, and her careful pronunciation of his given name sent a terrible shiver down his spine, and he knew, with sudden certainty, that he was going camping. 

 

 

 

Jughead got up from where he was sitting on the coffee table, paced around the living-room-slash-kitchen area of the apartment several times, and repeatedly dragged his fingers through his hair. Betty just watched him, her eyes tracking his movements, cup of cocoa braced between her palms once again. 

“I can’t say it,” he finally said, slowing to a stop by before he began his pacing again, this time at a less frantic clip. “You’ll think I’m certifiable.”

“No, Jug,” she said in the softest voice. “I won’t.” 

He looked at her helplessly. She was so pretty in her grey shirt with its delicate, lacy collar, with wisps of hair falling against either of her cheeks, with all her willingness to believe him. She was the last person in the world whose affection for him he wanted to destroy with the truth. She was also the only person in the world asking him for it. 

He drew in a long, slow breath. “I’m - I’m a… ”

Betty leaned forward. “You’re... ?” 

“Fuck.” He turned away from her. “I can’t. This is - you should forget we ever had this conversation.” He braced a hand against the back of his neck. “I’ll call you a ride home.” 

She got up and approached him, placing a hand lightly on his bicep. Her fingers were still the slightest bit chilly. She didn’t say anything. In the silence, he was alarmed to find that he could - not _hear_ exactly, but feel, emanating through the room, a faint but steady pattern of thrumming that could only be her heartbeat. 

Without looking at her, he said, “I’m a wolf.” 

“What?” Betty asked. 

Jughead turned toward her, hoping that the seriousness in his expression would lend a bit of authenticity to the words he was about to say. “I’m a… werewolf.” 

She blinked. And then she blinked again, her brows knitting. And then she blinked one more time, her expression shifting from confusion to disappointment as she dropped her hand from his arm as if she’d been stung. “Jug,” she said in a quiet, chiding voice that was laced with frustration. “I’m being serious. I know humour is one of your defense mechanisms, but - ”

“Betty,” he interjected. “It’s not a joke.” 

She frowned in a way that made her bottom lip stick out slightly, scrutinizing his face as if searching for signs of dishonesty. “So is it… a metaphor?” 

For half an instant, those words made him want to smile, but the impulse faded before it really registered. “I told you. I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.” 

“I’m sorry, Jughead, but we haven’t spoken in a few days. Forgive me if I thought you’d come up with a slightly better excuse for abandoning me in your bed than _I’m a werewolf_.” 

“It’s not an excuse,” he promised her, despite the sinking feeling in his chest; he knew how unlikely it was that she’d believe him, but being confronted with her suspicions felt even worse than he’d imagined. “Betty, I swear. I swear it to you on - on anything. On that weird rabbit doll you always brought to kindergarten, on every book Toni Morrison’s ever written, on _Archie_ \- I would have stayed with you if I could have, but I couldn’t.” He swatted a lock of hair out of his face. “It was a full moon on Halloween. My first.” 

She leaned back a bit and stared at him. Her eyes flicked over his face, but he couldn’t read her expression. 

“That’s how I know Cheryl,” he said quietly. “That’s how I know Jason. They’re like me.”

Her left eyebrow inched upward for the second time that night. “Cheryl Blossom is a _werewolf_ ,” she said skeptically. 

“Yes. I mean, yes, but - I don’t know if that’s the correct term, exactly. It’s all French. I think Cheryl’s a _garou lupine_ , but… it all basically means the same thing.” 

“Lupine?” Betty echoed. “Juggie, that sounds like _Harry Potter_.” 

“I know,” he sighed. “I know. But it’s real. It’s… what I really am.” When she didn’t respond, he continued, carefully, “I inherited it. From my mom. She’s one, too.” 

In an equally careful voice, Betty asked, “Jellybean, too?” 

“No. When it’s only one of your parents… the odds are pretty well fifty-fifty.” 

“So you… ”

“I'm unlucky,” he said. “Really fucking unlucky. And I’m in a pack with the creepiest twins since _The Shining._ ”

The word _pack_ was a mistake; at it, Betty seemed to balk - not much, just the tiniest twitch in her expression, but it was there. He watched as she lowered her lashes, looking down at her feet. 

“It’s okay if you don’t believe me,” he told her after a beat of silence. “I probably wouldn’t believe me.” 

“It’s just a hard thing to believe,” she murmured. She pressed her lips together and then looked at him again. “Can you… prove it?”

“Prove it?”

“Yeah.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Can you… show me?” 

“You want me to turn?” he asked, unable to help his incredulous tone. 

“I - I guess.” Her jaw set stubbornly before she said, more decisively, “Yes.” 

“No.” Jughead took a large step backward. “No way. I could hurt you. I’m… young, my impulses aren’t - ” He forced himself to stop speaking and take a breath. “The reason Jason was creeping around, and the reason I knew you were there, or you’d been there, outside, even though I couldn’t see you - it’s because I could smell you. He could, too. Our sense of smell is… heightened.” 

Betty didn’t say anything to that, only looked at him with wide eyes for a moment before her expression shifted. He could tell she was thinking something through in that deliberate way of hers, a way he recognized from late afternoons in their school newspaper office. 

It wouldn’t be fair of him to expect her to absorb everything he’d just told her, to process it, right there in his living room. He’d had four years to try and process it and was still struggling, still overwhelmed at times, and he had the proof of what he was right in his body, terrible and undeniable evidence of it every single month. 

He moved closer to her again, but left about an arms-length between them. He tilted his head slightly, trying to get a hint, from her eyes, as to what she was thinking. “Hey,” he said. “Let me get you a Lyft home, okay?” 

The furrow between her brows looked almost apologetic, but Jughead couldn’t tell if that interpretation was wishful thinking on his part. “Okay.”

 

 

 

With a brand new sleeping bag under his arm, Jughead followed his mother into the woods by Sweetwater River. They were about twenty minutes out of town, far from the lovers’ lane where kids his age went to park and fool around. The trees in the area were dense. Gladys walked quickly and with purpose - for a woman who hadn’t lived in Riverdale for three years, her geographic memory was impressive. 

She led him down close to the bank. She kept looking up at the sky. 

“Do you have a tent?” he asked. There was much less irritation in his voice than he would have liked there to be, but he was tired, and he felt funny, sort of off-balance. He’d been feeling odd for a couple days, like he had a low-grade fever that was threatening to turn into something more, and Gladys’ sudden appearance definitely wasn’t making him feel any better. He just wanted to pitch the tent, eat a few s’mores, nod along to whatever excuses his mother offered for her lengthy absence, and fall into a satisfying sleep. 

“I thought we’d sleep under the stars,” she said. 

“It’s October. It could rain. It could even snow.” 

In response, she said, “I brought sandwiches.” 

After he inhaled a sandwich and a protein bar, his mother put a hand on the centre of his back and said, “Jughead. Look at the moon.” 

He took a drink from the bottle of water she’d given him and did as asked. 

The full moon seemed to pierce his eyes, to burn his retinas. As he looked at it, he felt a searing pain in his stomach that seemed to travel upward into his chest. His fingers tensed into ugly, crooked positions. He could not help his strangled scream. 

When he could see again, he found that his head was cradled against his mother’s chest. One of her hands was keeping his hair pushed back, out of his face, and she was speaking to him softly in a language he managed to recognize after a moment as French. 

“What’s happening?” he demanded. His voice was raw, and he realized that he was crying. 

“Shh,” was all Gladys said as Jughead howled with pain, feeling as though his bones were ripping through his skin. “Shh, mon bébé.” 

 

 

 

He became human again down by the river’s edge, begging his mother for a mercy she couldn’t grant him. She laid a rough blanket over his naked body, and as he stared up at the clouds moving across the pink sky of the early morning, that blanket felt nothing like a shield and every bit like a snare he couldn’t escape. 

 

 

 

He walked with Betty downstairs and waited outside with her. The wind blew east and Jughead could smell, mixed in with all of her usual scents, traces of the faux-fresh fragrance of antiperspirant. He wanted to believe that it was him, just him, just the boy she’d once kissed and not the wolf inside, that was making her nervous. 

A car pulled up to the curb. She took a step forward and offered him a small, polite smile that conveyed a silent _goodnight_. 

“Betts,” he said, before she could go further. 

When she turned to him, there was a familiar openness in her face that seemed to send shockwaves of relief through his system. She wasn’t - at least for this moment - repulsed by him or convinced that he was experiencing hallucinations. 

“I told you,” he began quietly. “Because I… ”

The words that would have finished the sentence got stuck in his throat and refused to dislodge. Because he cared about her, in more ways than one. Because, dumb as it may have been, a little part of him believed in their ninety-two percent compatibility. Because he wanted to put his mouth on hers again and feel her melt into him. 

Betty studied him for a moment as the wind played with her ponytail. She nodded slowly and said, “I know.” 

 

 

(to be continued...)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... how _are_ you supposed to react when the guy you're into tells you he's a werewolf?

_“I’m a werewolf.”_

What Jughead had told her could not possibly be true. Werewolves didn’t exist. Of this, she was certain. But then, Betty had once been certain that people didn’t just turn invisible, either. 

(She was still fairly certain of that. As far as she knew, she was the only one.) 

Her Lyft driver dropped her off outside her dorm, but she didn’t go inside. She walked to the library instead. Though it was open twenty-four hours, once she passed by the engineering and math students who seemed to permanently inhabit the first-floor study bays, she was alone. Down in the barely-lit stacks, she collected dozens of volumes, arranging them neatly across a long table that she had to herself. Then she got to work.

Hours later, her eyes now starting to cross over the tiny print of a nineteenth-century tome on lycanthropy, Betty’s brain sent out a tiny, journalistic blip: _Go to the source_. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Betty went invisible, the things she touched went invisible too—within reason. Her clothes, for example. Her purse. Anything small she held in her hand. 

She stood contemplating an abandoned bicycle that was chained to the rack outside the library, twiddling a bobby pin that had been at the bottom of her coat pocket between two fingers. 

“Well,” she muttered to herself, “let’s find out.” 

She climbed on the bicycle and hoped for the best. Mostly, it worked. Her halo, or whatever it was, left a sliver of rear tire showing. But it was still mostly dark out, and this was good enough, she figured. It _did_ take a few minutes to get the hang of riding an invisible bicycle, but she managed to do it, in the end.

As the first rays of early morning sunlight creaked over the horizon, Betty stood with one foot on the pavement of an unlit country road, looking down a long dirt driveway at a small, ramshackle, single-story home almost totally concealed amongst the tall pine and maple trees. She and Archie had dropped Jughead off here before Thanksgiving last year, right here at the very end of the driveway, where an old mailbox bore the legend _G. Jones_ and a patina of rust. 

Jughead had not invited them inside. 

When she and Archie returned to campus the following Sunday, Jughead was already back in the dorm room he shared with Archie, sprawled out on the bottom bunk with his nose in _The Norton Anthology of American Literature_. 

“Kitchen knives are dangerous, Betts,” he’d said, in response to her querying look at the bandage that was wrapped around his right hand. 

A light was on inside the house. She could see a figure moving around what was probably the kitchen, silhouetted against sheer curtains. A woman’s shape, she thought, though it was hard to tell at this distance. 

The figure paused. It seemed to turn towards the window, to be looking out at her, and for the second time in less than twelve hours, an invisible Betty Cooper had the unmistakable impression that she was being _seen_. 

She turned and pedaled away, wondering what, exactly, she had expected would happen.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You look awful,” Veronica said, leaning over her elbows on the table. Her fingers curled delicately around a steaming cappuccino, and her lips curled into something more than the hint of a smile. 

“You don’t have to sound so cheerful about it.” 

Veronica’s smile broadened. “I’m merely noting the mounting evidence for my theory that there’s more to you than meets the eye, Betty Cooper. And that you are meeting someone, somewhere, who’s keeping you from your usual beauty rest.” 

Betty rolled her eyes. Brunch had been her idea, but she’d begun regretting it the moment Veronica walked through the restaurant door, flicked her eyes up and down Betty’s haggard appearance, and put two and two together in an equation that Betty didn’t think would ever add up to four. 

But… girl talk. After the night—and morning—she’d had, she needed girl talk. 

“I _told_ Archie. There’s nothing to your theory. There’s no secret hot hookup.” 

“Give me one other good reason you obviously didn’t sleep a wink last night.” She placed her cappuccino on the table and popped a nearby strawberry into her mouth, brow raised expectantly. 

_I went to the library at one in the morning and spent several hours researching werewolf mythology and then rode a bike over ten miles_ , Betty thought. She said, cautiously, “Okay. It is kind of about a boy,” and then poked her fork into her scrambled eggs. 

Veronica’s grin became positively euphoric. “I knew it.” Then she seemed to recalculate _kind of about a boy_ with what she saw across the table, and the grin vanished. “Oh, no. Honey. What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing’s wrong, exactly. It’s just complicated.” 

Veronica nodded solemnly. “They’re remarkably good at making life that way, simple though most of them are.” She sat up straight. “Well, first things first. Who is he? Someone I know? Another mystery date?” 

“No, he’s someone I knew already. From my—my anthropology class,” she improvised. “We just kind of started hanging out a little outside of class, and then it… escalated. Not _that_ much,” she added hastily, when Veronica’s eyebrows threatened to hit the ceiling. “We made out, that was it. And I fell asleep at his apartment.” 

“And then?” 

“And then…” Betty slumped in her chair and began poking at her eggs again. She decided to omit the next part. “I don’t know. He was weird the next time I saw him. And later, he apologized for behaving the way he did, but I’m not sure I believe…” She scooped up a forkful of eggs and shoved it in her mouth, thinking carefully as she chewed and swallowed. “I believe his apology was sincere. And I think he really likes me. I just—the reason he gave for acting the way he did—that’s the part I’m not sure I believe.” 

“You can do better,” Veronica said, without hesitation. “Whatever he did, whatever excuses he made? Not worth making yourself crazy over. You deserve nothing less than perfection.” 

“Okay, but…” How was she supposed to explain this without sounding like a terrible teen romance novel? “V, he—you know I’m not very experienced, right? This was the first time I’ve ever kissed someone and, you know… _felt it_.” 

Veronica reached a hand across the table and gently closed it around Betty’s forearm. “That’s lust. That’s just your hormones talking.” Her voice was gentle, soothing. “I know how intoxicating they can be—trust me, I do. But also, trust me when I tell you that even if this was the first time you felt that, it won’t be the last. Okay?” 

Betty nodded, hoping she looked more convinced than she felt. “Okay.” 

“Good,” said Veronica, withdrawing her hand. “Now, you go home and get some rest, okay? I’m going to need you at my apartment this evening. Seven o’clock sharp.” 

“For what? It’s Sunday.” _It’s college, Betty, no one cares about “school nights” anymore_ , she thought, chastising herself before Veronica could. 

“Oh, an old high school chum is stopping by on his way back from Jay Peak. Opening weekend of ski season,” she explained, when Betty looked confused. “I promise I won’t try to set you up with him; you’ll loathe the boy. But come for drinks and for Archie, won’t you? Nick and I were very… _will they or won’t they_ in high school. We never _did_ , and we never will, but I have the feeling Archie might like to have an extra friendly face around.” 

“Okay,” she said, her guilt over not seeing much of either of them over the past couple of weeks kicking in. “I’ll be there.” 

“Good.” Veronica withdrew her hand. “Now, this might sound crazy, but—well, I’ve been hanging out with the boys a lot lately. And I _know_ you both have a history of not noticing how nicely the other grew up—”

“Veronica, no,” Betty groaned. But it was already too late. Veronica’s eyebrows were raised again.

“ _Have_ you ever seriously thought about Jughead?”

Unable to look Veronica in the eye, Betty stared at her scrambled eggs and shook her head.  

“Just an idea,” Veronica said. “Never you mind, Elizabeth Cooper. We’ll find the right guy for you.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Veronica was right. Within thirty seconds of meeting Nick St. Clair, she loathed the boy. Archie didn't seem to know quite what to think; even right now, with Veronica literally perched on one of his knees as she dazzled the party, Archie was acting like he imagined Nick might be planning to abscond with Veronica at any second. 

The doorbell rang, and Veronica sprang up to answer it, leaving the two of them alone. Archie reflexively cracked his knuckles. 

“Archie,” she said, putting a hand on the knee Veronica had just vacated, “he’s not going to do anything.” 

“Something’s off about that dude,” Archie muttered, as Veronica reappeared with another guest in tow. 

“Nick, Cheryl. Cheryl, Nick,” Veronica was saying. “And Cher, you know the Pussycats, of course. And Betty and Archie.”

 _Great_. 

“ _Naturellement_.” Cheryl’s crimson lips curled into a wide smile as she took in Nick. Jason, Betty was relieved to note, did not seem to be with her tonight. “Ladies,” she said, taking in Melody, Valerie, and Josie before turning to the corner in which Betty and Archie sat. “Ginger Baker. Pollyanna.” 

Betty wished, vaguely, that she could disappear right now, and dug her fingernails into her palm as she smiled at Cheryl in a way that she hoped came off as pleasant. 

“Champagne for the lady?” Nick inquired. When Cheryl nodded, he disappeared into the kitchen, returning moments later with two fizzing flutes. 

Veronica reestablished herself in Archie’s lap but leaned forward eagerly to listen to Nick’s description of his many trips down the black diamond slopes. The nap she’d taken that afternoon was not enough to keep Betty’s mind on a stranger she didn’t like describing a ski trip she didn’t care about; frankly, she doubted she would have been able to focus on Nick even if she had gotten a full eight hours the night before. She settled instead for trying to figure out who Josie’s new boyfriend reminded her of, and elbowed Archie in the bicep when it finally came to her. 

“Reggie Mantle,” she whispered, nodding her chin at the three of them—Josie and her flame were deep in conversation with Cheryl now. “He looks like Reggie, right?” 

Archie squinted into the corner. “I guess so.” 

“He does,” Betty insisted. 

And then she saw the telltale sign of something that made her heart sink: Cheryl’s head, dipping low in a sway that was more insidious than simple drunkenness. She watched Cheryl climb to her feet using the arm of Veronica’s sofa for support, her ankles seeming not quite stable. 

“Excuse me, ladies,” she said. “It’s time for my constitutional.” 

Nick was on his feet at once, offering to take her elbow, and then Betty was on her feet too, all her instincts running full throttle. 

“I’m going to the restroom,” she told Archie, shoving her wine glass into his hand. 

She did not go to the restroom. She went only around the corner, then thought _I want to disappear_ and—grabbing her coat and purse surreptitiously from the rack by the front door—followed Nick and Cheryl as they made their way down the stairs.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Veronica’s apartment building sat on the edge of a wooded nature preserve, and though Nick seemed to be trying to steer Cheryl towards a very expensive car that Betty assumed was his, Cheryl’s pull won out. They disappeared into the woods, and Betty followed. 

She glanced up at the sky, though she knew it was much closer to the new moon than to a full one. Nevertheless, Jughead had said—hadn’t he said?—that it was possible to transform at will. 

Betty shook her head. Whether _that_ was the truth or a delusion or part of a performance art piece for a class she hadn’t been informed Jughead was taking didn’t matter right now. She needed to be figuring out a plan. There was only one of her, and she was unarmed save for the Swiss Army knife she always carried in her purse. Cheryl seemed, if not completely incapacitated, then at least out of it enough that Nick might be able to overpower them both. 

After a few minutes’ walk, Cheryl suddenly whirled around, looking right at—or really, right through—her. Betty caught a yellow glint in Cheryl’s eyes that she had never seen before, and knew she needed to act now. 

She dug the nails of her left hand into that palm, and with her right, reached into her purse for the knife. 

“Get your hands off her, Nick,” she called, her words echoing across the forest as she pulled out the blade. 

Nick spun so fast he dropped Cheryl completely on the ground, but any trace of nervousness vanished from his face as he realized who had spoken. “What have we here?” 

“Leave,” Betty ordered. “Leave her alone. Now.” 

He chuckled. “Pardon me…Betty, wasn’t it? Pardon me, Betty, if I take it for granted that you have zero first-hand experience of the carnal act. See, when a man and a woman find each other attractive, they—” 

“Pardon me if I take it for granted,” she spat back, “that _you_ have zero understanding of what consent is, Nick. Let me give you a hint—it’s not whatever you so obviously slipped in Cheryl’s drink.” 

From where she’d landed on the ground, Cheryl emitted a noise that was positively feral, baring her teeth as she did so. Betty was horrified to see that Cheryl’s canines were now longer and sharper than any person’s had a right to be. 

_Oh, god_ , she thought; _Cheryl’s not in control_. Nick, thank goodness, had not seemed to notice. 

“Now, Nick,” she said—stepping closer, brandishing the knife at both of them. 

“You know, I warned Ronnie,” he said, stepping back a little. “I warned her not to leave civilization for you backwoods heathens and your total disregard for manners.” 

“Fuck off, you pervert,” Cheryl growled. “Before I rip your throat out.”

“That’s how you treat a gentleman?” Nick said. “Tut, tut. Ronnie is going to have a field day with this one.” But finally, with a disbelieving shake of his head, he went. 

Betty kept her eyes on him for a good long while, until she was sure he’d truly left them. Should she call Veronica now, she wondered, and warn her? But then, Nick had obviously never tried to pull this shit with her before; if he had, she knew, Veronica would not have remained friendly with him. 

From behind her came a strangled, desperate howl. 

Heart pounding harder than it ever had before, Betty turned around. Where previously Cheryl had been, Betty now saw only a large red wolf, teeth bared and golden eyes fixed on her, its flanks heaving with effort as it tried to get to its feet. Cheryl’s clothes lay in a pile behind it. 

Before she could decide whether the better course of action was to run or to try to defend herself with the Swiss Army knife, the wolf that was Cheryl Blossom collapsed on the forest floor with an almost elegant _thud_. 

Betty pulled her phone from her purse and made two phone calls. The first was to Veronica, to whom she lied and said she’d gone home with a migraine. The second...

  
  
  
  
  
  


“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said, when Jughead arrived twenty minutes later. 

His jaw hung open. She hadn’t explained anything on the phone; she’d only pinged him her GPS coordinates and told him to get there as fast as he could. 

“What the hell?” he muttered. “What happened? Betty, are you—are you _petting_ her?” 

Betty pulled her hand back from the red-gold fur, the look on Jughead’s face clueing her into the fact that stroking an unconscious werewolf, while surprisingly pleasant, _might_ not be the smartest thing she’d ever done. 

“I had to make sure she was breathing,” she said, as Jughead crouched next to her and began examining the wolf. _Cheryl_. “She’s so soft. Juggie, is this what you—” 

He shook his head. “I have no idea.” 

Then the enormity of what she’d said seemed to hit him, and his eyes whipped from Cheryl to her. They sparkled with something—fear, or maybe hope? She couldn’t tell. 

“You believe me?” Jughead asked softly. Betty took his hand in hers, squeezed it gently, and nodded. 

“It would be hard not to, now,” she said. 

They both looked back at Cheryl. 

“So you saw her… change?” 

Betty nodded again. “Sort of. I didn’t see the whole thing, I…” She sighed and stood up, suddenly anxious to stretch out her legs; Jughead mirrored her. “I’m guessing you have a lot of questions about this.” 

“I can think of a few, yeah.” 

“I was at Veronica’s; I’m sure you heard about her friend from New York and all that. And Cheryl was there too.”

“Not Jason?”

“No, thank god, just her. Anyway, long story short, Veronica doesn’t seem to realize her dear old school chum is a date rapist. I’m sure he slipped something in Cheryl’s drink. She said she needed some air, and I just—I got this funny feeling, so I followed them outside—”

“You _followed_ them?” Jughead seemed taken aback. “Betts, that’s—why didn’t you ask Archie to come with you?”

“I followed them outside,” Betty said a little louder, “and, well. I don’t know if Cheryl knew I was here or not, but I saw a weird glint in her eye, and then her teeth sort of…” She shuddered at the memory. “I think she meant to transform and attack him and then lost control, but before she did, I scared Nick off—don’t look at me like that, Jughead, I always carry a pocketknife. Anyway, I don’t think he noticed anything odd about her.” 

“I guess that’s good news,” he said, though he sounded doubtful. 

“And then the drug knocked her out. So what do we do? I didn’t think I could just leave her here, so…” 

Jughead opened his mouth, closed it without saying anything, then squeezed his eyes shut and dragged a hand slowly down his face. 

“Do you happen to know if Cheryl drove tonight?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She went back to Veronica’s to collect Cheryl’s things (Nick’s car, she noted with pleasure, was gone), slipping invisibly in and out and sending a silent thank-you to Veronica for neglecting to lock her door. It didn’t take her long to locate the car Jughead had described as Cheryl’s, a bright red vintage convertible that was the size of a small boat. Glancing around to make sure there was no one watching, she turned visible again, then let herself into the car and drove it slowly to the gates of the nature preserve. 

Jughead was waiting by the edge of the treeline, not too far off the road. The wolf lay beside him, still unconscious, and she found herself relieved that Jughead had managed to get her this far on his own. Cheryl’s clothes were bundled under one of his arms. 

“No one saw me,” she said, hopping out of the car. “They were all pretty wasted.” 

“There’s a small miracle I never thought I’d appreciate,” Jughead muttered. 

They both looked down at Cheryl. 

“Do we put her in the trunk, or…?” Betty wondered. 

Jughead winced. “I think the backseat’s big enough.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Out of nowhere, Jughead spoke, his tone incredulous. “You took on a werewolf and a date rapist with a _pocketknife_?” 

“I had to do something, Juggie.” 

His eyes slid sideways to her, just for a moment, before refocusing on the road. “That’s either the bravest or the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.” 

They drove past the coffee shop in whose bathroom Cheryl had warned her, last night, to stay away from Jughead. Deep in the pit of her stomach, a magnet activated. 

“I don’t think I’m mad at you anymore,” she said quietly. 

The corner of Jughead’s mouth twitched.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“The Blossoms live about ten miles out of town,” he said, shifting Cheryl’s convertible into a higher gear. “I’ll drop you off at the dorm. It’s—it’s safer if they don’t know you know anything.” 

“Won’t they smell me in the car?” 

“We might be able to think of an explanation for that. I have no idea how I’d explain driving you to their house.” 

“Okay,” she said. She looked over at him, at the shadows that scattered over his face as he drove under streetlights.

She swallowed.

She had no intention of _staying_ in her dorm room. 

“How will you get back from there?” 

“I’ll get Jason to drive me or something. Don’t worry about that.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She waited in his room, in the dark, all the lights out so it would look as though no one was home. Why she felt like she needed this one final bit of proof after what she’d seen tonight, she couldn’t say. Nevertheless, she waited in Jughead’s bed, knees pulled up to her chin, one hand around the mug of peppermint tea she’d made herself. Neither Archie nor Jughead drank peppermint tea, but for some reason they had a box of it. 

The front door creaked open, and she saw the light come on. 

“Betty,” said Jughead’s voice, almost immediately. He sounded surprised, but not upset or unsure of the situation. “You broke into my apartment and you’re in my bedroom drinking a cup of the tea Veronica insisted we buy for you.” 

She heard his footsteps coming down the short hallway. The door opened, and he turned on the light. 

“Hi,” she said. Her heart started to beat a little faster, and she wished it wouldn’t; she was pretty sure Jughead could sense the change. 

“Hi.” Jughead crossed the few steps to his bed and sat next to her before shrugging off his jacket. 

“Will Cheryl be okay? I don’t know exactly what he gave her, but I brought some information on date rape drugs from my RA stuff.” It occurred to her, now, that drugs might work differently on werewolf metabolisms. 

He nodded. “They think she’ll be fine. She’s sleeping it off.” 

“Sorry for breaking in.” She sat the tea on his nightstand, then turned back. “I just—I—”

“What?” 

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you before.” 

He snorted, but it was a gentle snort. “There’s no way I could blame you for that. _I_ don’t believe it half the time, and I live with it.” 

“And there’s something else. Something I should tell you, if there’s… if there’s going to be an us. If that’s something you want,” she added, at the look of surprise that popped into his eyes. 

Jughead’s voice, when he spoke, was soft. “Is that something _you_ want?”

“I asked you first.” 

He sighed. “Of _course_ , I—who wouldn’t?” 

_Lots of people_ , she thought silently, biting her lip; _surely you’ve noticed I’ve never dated much?_

“But you just saw about a hundred pieces of incontrovertible evidence as to why it’s a bad idea,” Jughead continued. “Imagine Cheryl, imagine _that_ , when it’s not knocked out. Every month, Betty. Every full moon.” 

“Yeah, well,” she said. “I’m a girl; I know what’s it’s like to be inconvenienced once a month. And we all have our secrets.” 

Jughead shot her a leveling glance. “Not like _that_. On either count. That’s not speculation, by the way; that’s from Cheryl.” He stopped talking then, as though he’d just realized how nervous she was, and the air in the room seemed to still. “I’m in control right now, I’m not going to…” 

“It’s not that,” she assured him, although part of her insisted that logically, it should be. “Like I said, there’s something I should tell you. Or… showing you might be easier.” She stood up. As Jughead looked up, met her eyes with a question in his, it occurred to Betty that she had never once tried to do this when she knew someone was watching. 

She took a step back. 

_I want to disappear_ , she thought with all her might. And, just like clockwork, she did. 

Jughead stood up so fast that he almost knocked into her. “What the…” 

“I’m still here.” 

“Yeah, I know. I can sense you. I just can’t…” He blinked a couple of times. “Last night suddenly makes a lot more sense.” 

She nodded automatically, then chuckled a little, remembering he couldn’t see it. “Are you okay with this, Jughead?” 

“I mean…” He looked up and down at where she was. “I kind of have to be, right? It’s weird, but it’s nowhere near as weird as my thing. How long have you...” 

“Years. Since freshman year of high school.” Two things struck her, then. One was that Jughead had been there on that fateful day, though he wasn't acting now as if he remembered anything strange happening. The other was that she had never really _touched_ anyone while invisible. She had brushed against people here and there, sure, but never…

Would Jughead turn invisible too, she wondered? 

She took one of his hands in both of hers. His fingers blurred a little around the edges, but remained visible. 

“Still okay?” she asked. 

“I mean, on a purely selfish note, I do enjoy looking at you.” 

She took a step closer, pulling his hand to her heart. 

“Betty,” he said, his voice suddenly thick with what she hoped was want. He tugged her hands onto his own chest, and through the familiar burgundy sweater he wore, the one he’d had since high school, she felt his own heart racing in a way that seemed entirely new. 

“I’m here,” she breathed, just before she pressed her lips to his. 

Jughead responded with something approaching ferocity, but pulled back after a moment. “Can you make yourself visible again? Please?”

Quickly, Betty dug her nails into her palm. The look of relief on Jughead’s face when she popped back into view was almost enough to make her cry.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“I’m glad you went for a full-size bed over a twin,” she murmured, although as they lay now—she the little spoon, their legs tangled together—a twin bed would have been perfectly adequate space. This wasn’t post-coital bliss; this wasn’t even post-third-base bliss, but she was having a hard time imagining how she might feel any better than she felt at this moment. 

Jughead’s arm, which had already snuck all the way under the hem of the t-shirt she wore, tightened around the bare skin of her waist. 

“Came with the place.” 

“I’ll be sure to thank your landlord, then.” 

They remained silent for a few moments, Betty letting herself relax against his chest until the gears inside her brain decided to churn forth unfortunate reminders: of what had happened before; of what she had yet to tell him about her... ability. At some point he was going to realize, or she would have to tell him, that she used her power for much more than a trick for getting out of parties.

He seemed to sense the wave of tension that came over her. 

“Juggie…” 

“I’ll be here,” he said at once, his lips pressing the words into the curve between her neck and her shoulder, like a vow breathed into her skin. “I promise I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


(to be continued)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this gets said a lot, but it's true: fic writers thrive on reviews. When you have a chance, please drop a line here and on chapter 6, if you haven't already.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry about the delay with this one! Werewolf Jughead and Invisible Betty thank you for continuing to read their story.

Jughead woke up with Betty curled up against him, her loose fists against his chest, her face against his sternum, like he was somewhere safe. It was simultaneously a wonderful and terrible feeling. 

He wound his fingers gently into her hair, smoothing out blonde strands, sliding locks between his index and middle fingers. “You’re so beautiful,” he said quietly, mostly to himself. 

To his surprise, he felt her lips curl into a smile against his collarbone. Her breath was warm against his skin as she murmured, “Juggie.” 

Heat prickled up the back of his neck, and, somewhat embarrassed, he mumbled, “I thought you were asleep.”

She shook her head slightly and curled into him even more firmly, her head tucked beneath his chin. “You’re so warm,” she said, sleepy and sweet. 

“Kind of comes with the territory.” He skimmed his fingers down her spine, tracing vertebrae over the t-shirt of his that she wore, his favourite one, old and worn-in and very nearly fraying with an S emblazoned on its chest. 

“It’s nice,” she whispered. The way her breath kept ghosting over his skin was kind of turning him on, but beyond that, beneath his baser instincts, his heart squeezed in an unfamiliar way. He’d never thought there was anything nice about what he was, and all of his mother’s and Cheryl’s and Rose’s comments had never managed to change his mind. It was different, though, when Betty said it. 

After a moment of comfortable silence, during which Jughead slipped a thumb beneath the hem of the t-shirt and carefully stroked the skin at her hip, she shifted away just enough to lift her chin and look into her face. There was a crease from the pillow on her cheek. 

“Hi,” she said in a quiet voice that seemed to contain a multitude of questions. 

“Hey,” he returned, and dipped his own chin to kiss her, but her fingers came up to cover her lips, preventing their mouths from meeting. 

“I probably have morning breath,” she said. 

He tugged her fingers away from her mouth gently, entwining them with his own. “I don’t care,” he told her, simply, and kissed her. One of her hands drifted up to settle on his shoulder, clutching it like she wanted more. He wondered if it would be okay to roll them over, to press her back into the mattress. He wondered if it would be okay to do more than that. He also wondered - 

“Can you show me again?” he asked against her lips. 

She pulled back slightly, her eyes flicking over his face as if searching for something. Whatever she found there seemed to be satisfactory, because a moment later, she faded out of sight. 

It was crazy and amazing and sort of frightening, that she could do that, but she seemed to have a lot more control over her body’s ability to change than he did over his. He could still feel her breath, still feel the smooth skin of her hip under his thumb, but his eyes could find absolutely no evidence that Betty was in his bed. 

She put her fingers on his jaw, and he started. Her soft giggle made its way to his ears before she said, “Sorry.” 

“It’s okay,” he said, looking at the space that had last contained her face. He let her trace her fingers over his jaw for another few seconds before he said, “Come back.” 

She reappeared with the same ease with which she had vanished, her body materializing in front of him again. She looked shy, which was adorable in a slightly messed-up way - most people in the early stages of a relationship had insecurities about the other person seeing their body, not _not_ seeing it. 

Betty bit her bottom lip. “I showed you mine, Jug,” she said softly. 

“I can’t,” he said, surprised to find that he felt genuinely apologetic about it. “You saw Cheryl. It’s too dangerous. I’d never - I couldn’t put you at risk in that way.” 

She inched closer to him on the bed. Her bare foot curled around one of his ankles. Voice just a little breathy, she murmured, “So show me something else.” 

Jughead didn’t need to be asked twice. Half a second later Betty was on her back and he was peeling off his own shirt before settling his body over hers. Her hands skimmed over his chest and his back, her touch starting out tentative before turning curious, bold. He put his mouth on her neck, sucking lightly, nipping just a little, and was feeling pretty damn proud of the sound he’d gotten her to make and the way her fingers were gripping his hair when there were two sharp knocks on his bedroom door before it was immediately flung open. 

“Canoodle later, we need to chat,” said Cheryl’s bored voice as Betty gasped, scrambling up towards his headboard, and Jughead made a sound somewhere between a growl and a groan, moving off of her to sit at her side and yanking his comforter over his lap. 

“Are you fucking _kidding_ me, Cheryl?” he asked, practically vibrating with annoyance. 

“Your door doesn’t lock?” Betty asked faintly. Strangely enough, she seemed more afraid of Cheryl in human form than in wolf form. 

“Old building,” he explained. “Not that Cheryl would hesitate to pick a lock,” he added, shooting a glare at the redhead now standing - or really, _posing_ , one hip cocked - at the foot of his bed. 

“I’m touched that you know me so well,” she said, dropping down to sit on the bed, stretching her legs out and crossing one over the other. “I see things are going well for you two.” She looked at Betty, a hint of her predatory smile on her lips, and leaned forward slightly. Conspiratorially, she said, “He’s in pretty good shape for such a bookworm, isn’t he?” 

Jughead pressed a hand to his forehead and heaved a sigh. “You can’t change in your clothes,” he explained to Betty. “Your body bursts out of them.” 

“She knows,” Cheryl says, her eyes focused, laser-like, on Betty’s face. “Don’t you, Pollyanna?” 

“Cheryl - ”

Through the blankets, Betty nudged her knee against his, shutting him up, and answered for herself. “Yes,” she said. “I saw. Last night.” She looked Cheryl over. “You seem… back to normal.” 

“Yes, nothing a month or two of therapy won’t fix,” Cheryl said breezily, but her eyes shuttered for a moment before her red lips formed another smile. “I came to express my thanks. For your assistance last night.” 

The quirk of one of Betty’s eyebrows showed her surprise, but she said, simply, “Of course. That guy was an asshole.” 

Jughead blinked. He wasn’t sure that he’d ever heard Betty describe anyone as anything worse than a jerk. 

“Indeed.” Cheryl pursed her lips. “Betty, I’m in your debt. I was not… in a position to handle that situation. You prevented things from escalating - and I don’t just mean what he intended to do. Had he witnessed… well, what you witnessed, that would be rather unfortunate. Nana does so prefer that we don’t end up in a situation that necessitates murder.” 

“Right,” Betty said slowly, her eyes just a little wide in her face. “Well, um… you’re welcome? And you’re not in my debt - ”

“Oh, no,” Jughead interjected. “She is. And to repay your kindness, she can start leaving you alone.” 

“Forsythe is correct,” Cheryl said, tossing her hair over one shoulder. “I am in your debt, and I _will_ pay you back. The Blossoms do not let their debts linger. But I won’t be repaying you with something so pedestrian as _playing nice_ ,” she added, her mouth assuming a mocking pout for a moment as she looked at Jughead. “You helped me. So I’ll help you.” She turned her gaze back to Betty. “Tell me what you are.” 

“What?” Betty asked, frowning, her eyes darting over to Jughead. 

Under the blanket, he slid a hand toward her and touched her thigh. _Tell her nothing._

Cheryl rolled her eyes. “Don’t insult my intelligence with this charade,” she huffed. “Gladys doesn’t want you anywhere near her son, or her son anywhere near you - she thinks you’re a hunter, but that can’t be true, can it? If it were, you would have killed him by now. You would have killed me, when I was at my most vulnerable. No…” She shook her head. “That’s not it. So I’ll ask again. What _are_ you?” 

Jughead pressed his hand more urgently against Betty’s leg, but she didn’t look at him. “I’m just a person,” she said. “I’m not… like you.” 

“No, but you’re not _just_ anything. I can smell it on you. I can see it in you. There’s something. _You’re_ something.” 

Quietly but firmly, Betty said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

Cheryl got to her feet. “Let the record show that I tried.” She looked at Betty for a long moment and then said, somewhat grudgingly, “Thank you.” 

Then she circled around to Jughead’s side of the bed, pressed her claw-like nails into his shoulder, and whispered in his ear. “Ta mère va la tuer. Tu sais qu’elle le fera.” 

He pulled away from her, scowling. “Get out of my room, Cheryl. On a permanent basis. Text me like a normal person if you want to talk.” 

“That’s a silly request,” she said, sauntering to the door. She arched an eyebrow, looking back at them over her shoulder before she left. “None of us are normal.” 

 

 

 

After wolfing - which had, when it came to his eating habits, always been an apt descriptor - down a greasy breakfast at his favourite local diner and polishing off two pieces of Betty’s toast and the remainder of her bacon, Jughead poured what was left of his mug of coffee down his throat and then allowed himself to stare at her. There was the slightest of wrinkles, barely discernible but certainly there, between her brows. 

“Betts?” he asked, a gentle prompt. 

She smiled at him, and it was every bit as slow of a burn as sunrise on the morning after the moon was full, every bit as blissful to bask in as those first rays of relief. It occurred to Jughead, not for the first time, how ludicrous it was that a dating app was necessary to make him crave that smile, to want it turned in his direction, always. “I was just thinking,” she said. “This feels normal.”

He reached across the table to hold her hand in his own; he knew what she meant. “Yeah. This morning felt normal, too. Before Cheryl.”

“Before Cheryl,” she agreed wryly, linking her fingers through his. She sighed. “Even if you could tell me, phonetically, what she said to you, I might be able to figure it out. I took Spanish last year and it’s not that different from - ”

“Betty,” he interjected, squeezing her hand. This was the fifth or sixth time she’d pressed him on this, apparently unsatisfied with his initial answer of _some French shit._

All earnestness, she said, “I just think it could help us understand how she knows about me. What she knows about me.” 

“Whatever she knows, she only knows because she’s the heiress to some sort of weird we - ” He paused, said, “ _werewolf_ ,” lowly, and then continued at a normal volume, “empire. And from what she said this morning, it doesn’t sound like she knows much. I can figure it out, and I will, without forcing you to spend your day plugging meaningless phrases into Google Translate.” 

“Okay,” she said softly. “I just - I _want_ us to be normal. I wish we could be.” 

“I know,” he said, giving her hand another squeeze. 

She returned the gesture, her grip warm and reassuring. “Story of your life, I guess.” 

“Yeah, kind of. But I don’t mind being abnormal so much if I can do it with you.” 

Betty laughed. “What a _line_ , Jughead.” 

He grinned at her. “Isn’t that what normal guys do? Feed girls lines?” 

“ _Girls_ , plural?” she asked playfully, resting an elbow on the tabletop and propping her chin in her free hand. “Oh, at least tell me none of them are weirder than I am.” 

“Not one,” he teased, tapping his fingetips against her palm, tickling lightly. 

Betty was laughing again when a familiar voice called, “Jug! Oh, Betty, hey!” Instinctively, they released each other’s hands and sat up a bit straighter. 

Archie was approaching from behind Jughead, so Betty offered the first greeting. “Hey, Arch, Veronica.” 

“Betty,” Veronica said, in a bright voice that made him feel twitchy for some reason. She came to a stop beside their table and looked back and forth between them before she added, meaningfully, “And _Jughead_ ,” and the curiosity written all over her face explained how he was feeling. 

Archie, oblivious to his girlfriend’s study of their friends, slid into the booth next to Jughead. “Did you guys just finish? Aw, man, Ronnie,” he sighed. “This is what happens when it takes you forty minutes to do your hair.” 

Veronica arched an eyebrow, sliding in next to Betty, and then rolled her eyes at the sight of Archie’s boyish grin. “They’ll stay and have another cup of coffee while we eat. Won’t you?” 

“Why not,” Jughead said, knowing that he didn’t need to point out to Veronica that she and Archie had effectively trapped the two of them in the booth. 

“Perfect,” she said, and then began staring at Betty, an easy smile on her lips but an all-too-shrewd look in her eyes. Betty inched even closer to the wall, pretending not to notice.

Jughead pulled his phone out of his pocket, and while Archie debated breakfast options aloud, texted Betty, _don’t you disappear on me._

He knew the moment she got the text, because her lips twitched up into a smile that she suppressed almost immediately. She glanced at him from under her lashes and bumped his foot with her own under the table. It would do nothing to mitigate Veronica’s suspicions, the way they were looking at each other, but Jughead found that he didn’t really care. 

 

 

 

Archie spent the walk back to their place lamenting the fact that he had to somehow manage to write a decent paper for his history class in the next twenty-four hours, and Jughead spent the walk back passively listening, occasionally making sympathetic noises in what felt like the right places. Most of his brain was occupied with thinking about Betty’s pinky finger, which had brushed casually against his before they parted ways. She’d given him a secretive little smile, and as Jughead trudged along a sidewalk strewn with leaves next to Archie, who was now grumbling about the French Revolution as though it was a personal affront to him, Jughead looked down at his feet when he felt a matching secretive smile seem to burst into being on his own face.

It was stupid, that smile, stupid and naïve and overly optimistic, like a shot from the rising-action of a rom com, before the inevitable misunderstanding that would cause things to fall apart. It was not the kind of smile he ever allowed himself, and yet, he couldn’t quite manage to get it under control. 

In the apartment, Archie flopped onto the couch, flicked on the television, and tossed Jughead a video game controller, all in one fluid motion. Jughead caught it as automatically as it had been thrown and held it at his side, a certain amount of fond exasperation in his voice when he said, “History paper, Arch?” 

Archie gave him the same grin he so often gave to Veronica, the boyish one that always got him out of trouble. “One game first,” he said easily. 

There was no point in resisting, really, so Jughead dropped down onto the opposite end of the couch, controller in his hands. He frowned faintly as he watched Archie flick through the game’s menus. Thinking of Veronica reminded him of Betty and Veronica, the unit, and he wondered what they were doing at that very moment. He assumed that Betty would find a way to tell Veronica that her old friend Nick was an asshole who roofied girls by leaving out a few key details regarding what had happened to Cheryl. He also assumed that, before Betty could even begin to broach the topic, Veronica would pounce and demand to know what events had lead them to the diner that morning. Betty would deflect, probably, but he didn’t think she’d lie. 

“Jug,” Archie said, snapping him out of his thoughts. “Are you okay, man?” He pointed to the screen. “You just got murdered.” 

“Shit,” Jughead sighed, not because his character was dead, but because he’d just come to a realization: if Veronica knew that he and Betty were - well, whatever they were - then it was only a matter of hours before she’d pass that information on to her boyfriend. And Veronica _would_ know, because Jughead had learned, in the years he had known her, that she was absolutely nothing if not persistent. 

He thought of the way Archie’d thrown that controller at him, and the way he’d caught it. There were so many easy patterns like that in their friendship, well-known and oft-tread. Archie was more his family than the Blossoms were, certainly, and more his family than even his mother was. He’d kept a secret from Archie for years, out of necessity, but this was something he could tell Archie - and _should_ tell Archie, before Veronica beat him to the punch. 

“Hey, Archie, uh - ” He set his controller down on the coffee table and shifted slightly so that he was facing Archie rather than the TV. His palms were a little sweaty, so he wiped them on his thighs. “There’s something I want to tell you.” 

Archie looked at his face, and then at the discarded controller, frowning as if realizing that its absence from Jughead’s hands indicated a serious conversation was on the horizon. “Sure, Juggie. What’s up?” 

_Juggie_ was something Betty still called him fairly regularly, in that sweet, soft voice of hers, the one that somehow conveyed safety through the cadence of her breathing, but it had been a while since he’d heard it out of Archie’s mouth. It felt strange to hear it now, like the childhood nickname had morphed into something more intimate, something he shared with Betty alone, something he didn’t want intruded. 

His palms were damp again. 

“Betty and I,” he said slowly. “We’re sort of… seeing each other.” 

Archie blinked, his body jerking back slightly in surprise. “Like, you’re dating? You’re dating Betty?” 

“Yeah, I guess that’s the word for what we’re doing.” 

“Dude,” Archie said. “Wow.” He took a moment to digest the information, and then cracked a smile. “I can’t believe I made you download Mystery Date and go out with that girl Amanda when you were into Betty the whole time.”

“I wasn’t _into Betty the whole time_ ,” Jughead said, beginning to feel moderately terrified that he was going to blush. “Things just started with us.” 

“You went to prom together.”

“As _friends_ , Archie. I know it’s an unfamiliar idea to you, but boys and girls can be _friends._ ” 

Archie held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, his eyebrows lifting. “I know that. I’m friends with _Betty._ I’m just saying, man. If you’d made a move sooner, you could’ve been, like, married by now.” 

“You know prom was only two years ago, right?” Jughead asked, and then sighed, mumbled, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to snap at you.” 

“S’okay,” Archie said in his typical easy way. “I think it’s great, no matter how long you’ve liked her. Ronnie always says the best relationships start as friendships, anyway.” 

“Really?” Jughead couldn’t help but ask. “But you guys - ”

“I didn’t kiss her for a week, Jughead. A _week._ ” 

He schooled his face into an expression he hoped was appropriately serious considering the way Archie said that, like those were the most agonizing seven days of his life. “Right. Guess I forgot.”

Archie could see through him, though, and rolled his eyes before nodding to Jughead’s controller. “C’mon, let’s start again. _I_ want to be the one to kill you; don’t just stand around waiting for the zombies to come.” He went to the appropriate menu to start the game from the beginning, but didn’t select _play_. “Be good to her, Jug,” he said in an uncharacteristically grave voice. “She’s like my sister.” 

“I know, Arch,” Jughead said, and this time his seriousness was completely sincere. “I will.” 

Archie nodded and pressed the button to start the game. Without looking away from the screen, he added, “She better be good to you, too.” 

Jughead kept his eyes glued to the television, too. The stupid smile threatened to make a reappearance. 

 

 

 

After Archie finally headed off to the library, heaving dramatic sighs all the way to the door, Jughead went to his room and sat down at his desk, opening his laptop. 

He’d purposefully put the words Cheryl had whispered to him out of his mind. He told himself he didn’t have to give her words credence, that he’s under no obligation to _obey_ Cheryl Blossom. He told himself she’d probably just called him a moron. 

He wanted to pretend she hadn’t said anything, or that he hadn’t heard her, but he couldn’t. Betty, being Betty, would expect an answer eventually. And even if his inability to translate allowed him to ignore Cheryl’s words, he couldn’t ignore the icy chill that had crept up his back when she’d spoken, or the way she’d been looking at Betty only moments before, with genuine sincerity in her eyes. 

At his desk, he grabbed a notebook, flipped to a blank page, and wrote down Cheryl’s words: _Ta mère va la [two-eh?]. Tu sais que elle le [fair-ah]._ Some of it was easy enough - _ta mère_ was ‘your mother,’ _tu sais_ was ‘you know,’ but he needed help with the verbs. 

Jughead went to his bookshelf and extracted the Bescherelle his mother had given him when he was sixteen, like all he needed to ease the trauma of being a non-human creature was a solid understanding of French verb conjugation. He flipped through the book until he found the first word he needed, _tuer_ , and then, with mounting frustration, skimmed every line until he found _fera_ , buried among the conjugation rules for _vouloir_. He shoved the book away, opened Google Translate, and typed out the words. 

The result made him push away from his desk violently, his eyes widening as he stared at the screen. 

_Your mother is going to kill her_ , Google helpfully translated, _You know she’ll do it._

“Fuck,” Jughead breathed, getting to his feet. He slammed his laptop closed and began to pace around his room. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck._ ” He pulled his beanie off his head, tossed it on his bed, and raked his fingers through his hair, tugging at the strands. “Fuck.” 

His mother had not, to his knowledge, ever murdered someone, but even now that they were allegedly closer, united by their fates, he didn’t really _know_ Gladys. He didn’t know what she was capable of. He didn’t know why she’d feel inclined to kill a perkily-ponytailed blonde girl who just happened to be able to disappear, but he could remember the snarl of her mouth when she’d seen Betty in his prom photos. His mother thought Betty was dangerous. Cheryl had told them as much; she said Gladys thought Betty was a hunter, whatever the fuck _that_ meant - was Jughead now living a life in which being hunted down and killed was a real possibility? His mother sure as hell hadn’t told him that. 

His heart was beating in a way that was both well-known and strange, a fast-paced thrum that made him breathe harder through an open mouth. His limbs began to tremble, and he realized that he could turn, right then and there, from the sheer force of his horror, his rage. 

He needed to go to Thistle House. 

 

 

 

No one was home at the Blossom estate. The gates were closed, and though Jughead pressed and held the button on the ancient intercom for long enough to annoy, there was no answer. 

He could get in. He could undoubtedly climb the fence, and he could find an unlocked window to slip through and jiggle one of the old knobs on the back doors until it gave way. He could throw all the books off the shelves in the library, he could ransack the office that had once belonged to a man the family called _Grandpappy Blossom_ , he could dig Cheryl’s diary out from underneath her mattress and read every page. 

But there was no guarantee that any of that would give him the answers he sought. 

He did climb the fence, his limbs still shaking as though he’d accompanied Archie to the gym. From the top horizontal bar, standing above iron-wrought spikes, he leapt, and in the air his body bent at what was surely a terrible angle and claws finally broke free, taking the place of his fingernails. His clothes floated slowly to the ground as he landed on all fours, and he couldn't help but throw his head back and release a long, mournful howl before he took off for the woods. 

 

 

 

Several hours, one rabbit, and a very lengthy shower later, Jughead could not sleep. 

He’d run hard, and he was tired, but his mind could not afford his body the relaxation it was begging for. 

_You know she will_ , Cheryl had said, as though that knowledge placed responsibility on Jughead’s shoulders, as though, should his mother decide to transform from woman to wolf and sink her sharp teeth into the soft skin of Betty’s neck, the skin he’d been nipping at that morning with drastically different intentions, it was his fault. 

He reached for his phone. It was one o’clock in the morning, too late to call, but his thumb was already scrolling through his contacts, finding Betty’s number. 

She answered after the third ring. “Juggie?”

“Hey,” he sighed. The mere sound of her voice relaxed him a bit - she sounded completely okay. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“You didn’t.” 

“Writing a paper?”

“Catching up on things, yeah,” she said, her voice soft and slow. “Is that what you’re doing? Writing?” 

“No. I just… ” He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. “I couldn’t sleep.”

There was a pause. And then, with a teasing lilt to her voice, Betty asked, “Jughead Jones, is this a _booty call_?” 

“No,” he said quickly. “No. It’s just - I wanted to talk to you. Unless - ” He sighed again, and slouched back against his pillows, feeling closer to sleep than he had only a minute before. He smiled as he said, “Do you _want_ it to be a booty call?” 

“Jughead,” she said, with a laugh and a disapproving cluck of her tongue, and he allowed himself to close his eyes. 

“That was evasive,” he told her, still smiling. “It was not a yes _or_ a no.” 

“It was a - ” Betty kept talking, but her words were drowned out by the sound of a squealing tires and a car horn. 

Jughead’s eyes snapped open. “Betts - are you outside?” When she was silent, he asked more urgently, “ _Where are you?_ ”

“I just went for a walk,” she said. “To clear my head. I’d been staring at my computer for too long.”

“Betty, it’s the middle of the night.” 

“Jug,” she said gently. “It’s okay. No one can see me, remember?” 

He got out of bed, pulling off his pyjama pants and taking a pair of jeans out of his laundry basket. “Where are you?” he asked her again. 

“Juggie,” Betty said in that same gentle tone, a tone that said _don’t worry about me_ , but there was something a little firmer beneath it, a little harder, something that said _I can take care of myself_.

“It doesn’t matter who can see you, Betts,” he said, shoving his beanie on. “It matters who can smell you. Tell me where you are.” 

“On Lanark,” she said after a beat. “Near Third.” 

“Okay. Okay, good. You’re near the diner, the one we were at this morning. Can you go there? I’ll meet you.” 

“What? Jughead - ”

“Betty,” he cut in. “Please. Can you go to the diner?” 

“Yeah,” she said on a little sigh. “It’s not far.” 

“Good; okay.” Jughead tightened his grip on his phone as if doing so would bring him closer to her. “I’ll be there soon.”

 

 

 

Betty was sitting in the booth when he arrived, visible again, her hair up in a bun and a mug full of coffee on the table in front of her. Jughead headed right for her and reached for her, pulling her to her feet and into a hug that was probably verging on too tight. 

“Juggie,” she said against his chest. Her voice was muffled, but he could hear the notes of bafflement in it. 

He dug his nose into her hair, feeling, ridiculously, like he could cry. “You couldn’t just take a walk around your dorm?” he finally managed to ask, trying to make a joke. He pulled back slowly to look into her face, and he saw all of his own concern reflected in her eyes. 

 

 

(to be continued...)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> stillscape: question. is there any way we're wrapping this up in two chapters?  
> singsongsung: lol, no
> 
> ...who knew we'd have so many feelings about werewolves and invisible women? Thanks to all of you for continuing to indulge us in those feelings.

“You think your mother’s going to try to kill me?” 

At Jughead’s insistence, she had sat down to receive the news. Now he joined her, opting for the same side of the booth. He slid in close, pressing his thigh to hers; almost instantly, his hand landed on top of her leg. It was almost as though he needed some sort of physical reassurance that she was there, and alive. 

_Now this_ , she thought, as fatigue suddenly threatened to overtake her. She’d gone out tonight to work, to recharge her mind after the somewhat draining experience of spending half her evening dealing with Veronica—first explaining what she’d been doing in this very diner with Jughead, then having to forcibly restrain her friend from immediately setting out to murder (or possibly just castrate) Nick St. Clair. She needed to clear her head even more after Archie showed up at Veronica’s with a half-written history paper and an expression that told her everything she needed to know about what the boys had talked about that afternoon. She was _just_ preparing to see Chuck Clayton from a friend’s apartment back to his dorm when Jughead called her. 

And now, this. Her head was decidedly not clear. 

“I don’t know,” he said. “But Cheryl—what she said in French this morning, that’s what it meant. She said ‘Your mother is going to kill her.’” 

The hand on her knee gripped rather tightly. Though Jughead’s nails were blunt, it took some effort not to think about claws. 

“Do you think she will, though? Was that a real threat?” 

Jughead took an enormously deep breath and let it out, exhaling with such force that a napkin flew halfway across the table. “It’s—Betts, I don’t see how it’s a risk we can take. I know you carry that pocketknife, but trust me, it’s nowhere near enough. A full-sized machete wouldn’t be enough. I don’t think I could stop her even if I was transformed. And if anything happened to you because of _me_ —”

A waitress stopped by to refill Betty’s decaf and ask if Jughead wanted anything, and Betty shoved down the angry rant threatening to spill out of her, the one that started with _You can’t just break up with me, we’ve only been together for about thirty hours and anyway, aren’t decisions about my safety for me to make?_

“Really?” she said, when the woman had departed with a notepad full of scribbles. “Now?” 

He had the grace to look a little sheepish. “Some people lose their appetites when they’re stressed out. I’m the opposite. You know that.” 

“Don’t let this stress you out,” she said, although she was feeling rather stressed herself. She placed her hand atop the one of his that was covering her knee. “Okay? There’s a really easy solution, Juggie. We’ll just talk to your mom.” 

She watched the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, hard. 

“I knew better,” he sighed. “I _knew_ better than to start something with you, and I...”

“Did anyway?” The circumstances were all wrong, and she knew that, but she smiled a little anyway at the idea that she, endlessly overlooked Betty Cooper, might be irresistible.

“You’re handling this remarkably well.”

“Jughead, I’m not going to let what might be a completely empty threat tear us apart. Until your mother looks me in the eye and tells me she plans to kill me, I’m not going to panic.” 

Still clutching her knee—still, for that matter, looking as though he wanted to either throw up or burst into tears—Jughead leaned over and nuzzled a kiss onto the top of her head. She thought he might be about to say something, too, but the waitress chose that moment to return with his order, and he popped a French fry into his mouth instead.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“This isn’t going to be as comfortable as your apartment,” Betty warned. 

Jughead continued up the ladder of her lofted bed anyway, and crawled under the blankets beside her. “Too late for that, isn’t it? I already brushed my teeth and took my hat off.” 

He lifted an arm, and she scooted under it, snuggling up against his torso. In deference to the unpredictable but generally overactive dormitory heating, he’d taken off everything but his boxers; Betty let her hand rest lightly on the bare skin of his stomach, still marveling at how _hot_ he was (in both senses of the word), and at the irony of how _hairless_ he was here. 

If she raised her head a little, she’d be able to see the dark green toothbrush she’d just procured from her collection of useful spare toiletries; Jughead had deposited it unceremoniously into a spare coffee mug on top of her dresser, next to the stand where her own electric toothbrush charged. Also in the collection of useful spare toiletries were enough condoms to keep the entire population of the dorm STD-free for… well, probably only for a couple of days at most, but it was still quite the stockpile. Jughead had raised an eyebrow at the sight of the boxes, but said nothing. 

“You know, both the building and my door have very good locks. Thornhill Hall has gone over a hundred years without a recorded werewolf invasion.” 

“That’s more than we can say for my apartment,” he said dryly, and Betty smiled into his chest. “Are you sure it’s not against the rules of your job to, you know…” 

“Overnight guests are fine as long as I’m not on duty.” 

With his free arm, he switched off the lamp that was clipped to the side of her bed. The other arm wrapped just a bit more tightly around her back; he nuzzled into the top of her head again, and her stomach gave a pleasant little swoop. That Jughead Jones, of all people, was secretly into cuddling… well. Accustomed as she was to seeing sides of people that they typically kept hidden, this was different. There was something very different about Jughead _choosing_ to reveal himself to her. 

“It’s kind of funny, really,” she said. “I always thought _I_ was the one who’d have to worry about my mother trying to kill someone I’m dating.” 

“The world has a sick sense of humor sometimes.” Jughead shifted a little, and moved his free hand to her hip. “I think my mother is the only one on the planet who wouldn’t be ecstatic to have you be the person their kid brings home to dinner.” 

Under ordinary circumstances, Betty would have bolted upright; exhausted as she was now, she merely lifted her head and gave Jughead a peck on the cheek. “That’s it,” she said. “We’ll do it this weekend.” 

“We’ll do what this weekend?” 

“Invite your mother over for dinner. Or out to dinner. Which would be better?” 

Jughead was silent for a few moments. “I’ll have to think about that.” 

They awoke the next morning to find themselves alone, with no hint of Cheryl Blossom and no sense that the world outside was offering anything other than a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Betty _was_ on RA duty both of the next nights. Between her job, her duties for the student paper, a stop at the women’s portion of the student health center for a certain new prescription, and the insane amount of homework she had to turn in before Thanksgiving break the following week, she saw Jughead for a total of two and a half hours—the English seminar they shared, and a quick cup of coffee afterwards. 

“She said she’d come,” he told her, but he looked doubtful. He also looked like he wasn’t sleeping much. “I may have failed to mention a reason for this dinner other than ‘you haven’t seen our apartment yet’.” 

It had taken hours of debate, via text message, to decide on dinner at the apartment. Despite its lack of amenities (there was hardly any cookware, and no kitchen table), they would make do, because the apartment had one distinct advantage over being in public: privacy. Though Gladys would be less likely to try to kill Betty in a restaurant, if that was in fact a thing she wanted to do, Jughead thought she might be _more_ likely to be willing to have an actual conversation if there was no chance of being overheard. And Archie, it turned out, was more than delighted to vacate the premises for the night, if it meant Jughead was going to “make things official” by telling his mother about Betty. 

“Good. Are you sure you don’t have an opinion on the menu?” 

Jughead shook his head. “My mother wouldn’t know a home-cooked meal if it bit her in the ass. We can serve a frozen pizza for all she’ll care.” 

“I looked up venison, but it’s super expensive and I’ve never tried to cook it before.” 

“Betty, we do eat like normal people most of the time,” he sighed, and for the rest of the afternoon, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she’d insulted him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Even before the apartment door opened, she could hear Gladys Jones’ voice in the hallway: low, rough, the texture of it somehow both like and unlike a smoker’s. 

“ _That girl_ is here.” 

“Mom—”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Forsythe?” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you that girl is dangerous?” 

“Betty is _not_ dangerous.” 

“And you expect me to enter your apartment with her in there?” 

Seized with the same feeling she’d had when she’d pulled a pocketknife on Cheryl and Nick St. Clair, Betty strode to the door and swung it open, making sure to plaster on her biggest, most welcoming smile first. 

She had not seen Jughead’s mother in years and retained only a vague memory of what she looked like, a memory which proved to be more or less accurate: she was still not very tall, on the thin side, and indifferent to fashion. There were some streaks of gray in her hair that Betty didn’t recall from their childhood. 

“Hello, Mrs. Jones,” she said, having confirmed with Jughead in advance that his mother had not changed her married name or, for all he knew, even bothered to get a divorce. “It’s so nice to see you again. Won’t you come in?” 

There was no way, Betty knew, that she _looked_ threatening, in her soft gray wool skirt and pink collared sweater. She had left her hair up in its usual ponytail, even, not just to keep it out of the way while she cooked, but because she knew it made her seem younger, more innocent. Nevertheless, Jughead’s mother seemed poised to flee, and Betty got the distinct impression that she would have done so at once, had Jughead not been standing behind her, blocking the hallway. 

Jughead nudged his mother in the back, very gently. “Mom,” he said, his voice soft and pleading, “can you please, for once in your life, do this one thing for me? One thing that’s going to make my life less miserable instead of more?” 

This turned out to be the wrong plea. Gladys stood up to her full height, and though she was probably a good seven or eight inches shorter than her son, in that moment she seemed much more threatening. She turned on Jughead, seeming to expect him to stand down. 

He did not.

“She _knows_ ,” he said. “Betty knows, okay? Now will you please go inside before the neighbors hear us?” 

“Too late,” said a new voice, the accompanying clack of stiletto heels on old tile announcing the arrival of none other than Cheryl Blossom. Over his mother’s head, Jughead caught Betty’s eye and mouthed _Did you invite her?_

Betty shook her head.

“I took the liberty of inviting myself,” said Cheryl. She marched right past Jughead, cape swishing, and took Gladys by the elbow. “Entrez-vous, madame? Betty, something smells…” 

She paused for a moment, taking in what Betty herself thought was the most boring dinner she could possibly have prepared: stymied by both a lack of budget and the apartment’s lack of cooking equipment, she’d settled on a menu of baked chicken breasts, roasted potatoes, and a bagged, premade salad. 

“Like food,” Cheryl concluded.

  
  
  
  
  
  


This was, possibly, worse than the time Betty’s parents had invited Sweet Pea over for dinner. The fact that Jughead and Archie’s apartment lacked a proper table certainly wasn’t helping. Gladys had taken one corner of the sofa, while Jughead seemed unable to even contemplate sitting. Cheryl, who had produced a bottle of wine from somewhere, was now perched on one of the breakfast bar stools, sipping from an orange juice glass. 

“I think I’ll get you some proper stemware for Christmas this year, Forsythe,” she remarked. “There’s no need for you to live like a hobo.” Jughead shot her a look that clearly said they had never exchanged Christmas presents before and he did not intend to start now. 

Betty contemplated her pan of chicken breasts, which she knew were starting to dry out. “Would anyone like to eat now?” she said, trying to sound chipper. 

“I’m sure she would like that, wouldn’t she?” spat Gladys, who seemed determined not to speak directly to Betty. 

“For god’s sake, Mom, the food isn’t poisoned. I know you can smell as much.” 

Gladys stood up, began pacing the room. “You said _she knows_ , Forsythe. How could you have been so stupid as to tell her? Is that why she was spying on my house last week?” 

Jughead turned to look at her. “You did _what_ , Betty?” 

“I rode by her house on a bicycle,” Betty said. “I wasn’t spying.” 

“You didn’t tell me that.” 

“It didn’t occur to me to tell you that because it was completely meaningless,” she replied, feeling her blood start to heat up. “I never got closer than the end of the driveway.” 

“She is a danger to you,” Gladys said. “She is a danger to all of us, and I have no idea why you’re refusing to see it.” 

Jughead and his mother stood, staring at each other, and Betty tried and failed to find a better mental description for the scene than _with hackles raised_. She tried to dismiss that thought, and spoke to Cheryl instead. 

“A little help would be nice,” she said, “as long as you’re here.” 

Cheryl smiled serenely. She placed her glass on the counter, uncrossed her legs, and crossed them again the other way. 

“Happy to be of service,” she said. “Look. I agree that there’s something off about Shirley Temple here, but she’s not trying to kill us.” She paused, squaring her shoulders to Jughead’s mother. “If she was a hunter like you think, I wouldn’t be here right now. You know that, Gladys. She saw me transform, and she saw me unconscious, and she took care of me. Dear Forsythe may have displayed a serious lapse in judgement or three by going to bed with her in the first place, but that’s not why she knows what we are.” 

Jughead shot Betty a pointed look, and she tried, desperately, to keep her heartbeat steady. _I do **not** want to disappear_ , she thought, though in truth there was nothing she wanted more. 

Unfortunately, Gladys immediately landed on the question they most needed to avoid. “Then why did she call him for help?” 

Something uncertain flickered in Cheryl’s eyes, and Betty decided it was time to take action. 

“Because Jughead had told me the Blossoms were family friends.” She stepped out from behind the breakfast bar and over to Jughead’s side, wrapping an arm around his waist; his hand slid across her back and landed on her shoulder. “I couldn’t leave Cheryl alone in the woods like that. I knew Jughead knew where she lived, and I knew he wouldn’t say anything to anyone. That’s why I called him.” 

All of that was true, if you let the truth be a little elastic and looked at it sideways. What she had to say next was not.

Betty took a deep breath, looked Gladys Jones straight in the eye, and lied. 

“He didn’t tell me _anything_ about being—about being what he is, what you are, until afterwards. After I saw Cheryl.” 

“But he did tell you,” Gladys said, finally deigning to speak directly to Betty. “He did tell you, and you’re still here. You seem like a smart girl, and you’re certainly pretty enough to have your pick of men.” She took a step closer to them, folded her arms across her chest. “Why would you knowingly associate with a werewolf? Why would you choose _my son_?” 

In her peripheral vision, Betty could see that Cheryl appeared to be wondering much the same thing. She tightened her right arm around Jughead’s waist, only dimly aware that her left fist was clenched. 

“Because I like Jughead,” she said. “Because he’s special. Because he makes _me_ feel special.” 

There was a long moment of silence, during which Jughead squeezed her shoulder so hard she feared he might leave a bruise. 

“Well, aren’t you two cuter than a basket of kittens,” said Cheryl, in the voice of someone who found both baskets and kittens insufferable. She unfolded herself from the bar stool. “Gladys, has your homicidal rage been assuaged for the time being? I have to admit I’m not in much of a mood for cleaning up after a bloodletting.” 

It took all of Betty’s willpower not to wince.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Only when they were alone, and she was staring down the mess that was their completely untouched dinner, did Betty realize how tightly her left fist had been clenched. Or, more accurately, Jughead noticed, pausing in his tracks with a slight sniff. 

“You’re bleeding,” he said, his voice full of both concern and confusion as he took her hand and gently uncurled her fingers. “Betty, Jesus. What…” 

“It’s how I keep myself from disappearing,” she explained. She wasn’t _bleeding_ bleeding, really; this was just like the glisten of an over-picked hangnail. “Digging my nails in. Pain makes me visible.”

“You have to hurt yourself to do that?” He stared into space for a moment, like he was regretting having ever asked her for a second demonstration. 

“Juggie,” she said, reaching her right hand up to cradle his face. “It’s usually, like, two seconds of mild discomfort. It’s no big deal. Tonight was just… stressful.” 

“That it was,” he agreed. “But I think we at least convinced my mother you’re not trying to murder me, for the time being, which means she shouldn’t have any reason to murder _you…_ ” 

She tried to smile. “We threw a successful dinner party, then.” 

He kissed her, slowly and softly, and she made sure to keep her left hand closed as she wrapped her arm around him. When they broke apart, she dropped her forehead to his chest and left it there, breathing slowly in and out. 

“We should eat,” she said, finally, although nothing about the dinner she’d prepared seemed appetizing now. 

Jughead seemed to sense her reluctance. “Want to order a pizza? I’ll put all this away for tomorrow, or whenever.” 

“Okay.” She looked over the mess again, the dry chicken and soggy potatoes, and nodded. “Let me clean up my hand, and I’ll help you.” 

“Betts, I can handle it.” 

“I know, but I’ll feel better if I’m doing something.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The full insanity of the evening didn’t come crashing down on top of her until much later, when she had collapsed on the couch and put her feet on the coffee table. It was an avalanche unleashed—oddly enough—by the arrival of the pizza, by far the most normal thing to have happened that evening. Jughead stood up from the couch to answer the door, and in the time that it took him to pull out his wallet, everything that was unfair about this situation, about _Jughead’s life_ , rolled over her in a wave of fog—a wave that was thicker than pea soup, a wave so thick she couldn’t breathe—

A warm hand landed on her arm, and she jumped. 

“Betty?” 

She snapped herself back to attention. There was a pizza on the coffee table, two plates beside it, and she quickly sat up straight and swung her feet to the floor. “Sorry. I’m okay.” 

“You don’t have to be okay or sorry,” Jughead said. “Everything about this is fucked up.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Tonight, she had expected to stay over, had prepared for it, and so she had gone through her usual nighttime skin care regimen and was wearing her own t-shirt when she closed Jughead’s bedroom door behind her. There were other things in her overnight bag too, small square foil-wrapped things, though she wondered whether tonight was the right time to start using them. 

Jughead was already in bed. “Like my new addition?” he asked, nodding at the doorframe. At some point during the week, he’d installed a brand-new deadbolt, which Betty now slid into place. 

“I do. Is it wolf-proof?” 

“I thought it better not to test that out.” 

She climbed into bed with Jughead and curled herself against his side, breathing him in. 

“Thank you,” he said, softly. 

“For what?” 

He shifted on the mattress, scooting out from underneath her, and propped himself up on one elbow. “Everything.” 

In the tiny amount of light that had fought its way through and around his bedroom curtains, Betty saw fear flicker in his eyes—a different kind of fear, she thought, than the kind he’d worn in the diner last night. 

“Everything,” he echoed, “but especially what you said.” 

She felt her brow wrinkle in confusion; she had said a _lot_ tonight. One corner of Jughead’s lips quirked upwards in the tiniest of smiles, and he leaned forward to plant a kiss on the wrinkled spot. Then, she knew—both what he meant, and what the fear was. Her heart gave a single lurch forward, looping itself through affection and righteous anger and something that wasn’t quite pity before settling back in its usual spot. It beat, perhaps, a tad harder than normal. 

“You _are_ special, Jug.” 

He blinked once, twice; when his eyes fluttered open the second time, she saw hunger in them. His lips parted, ever so slightly, and she kissed them before he could get any words out. Her legs shifted underneath her, she gave Jughead’s chest a little shove with one hand, and by the time she ended the kiss, she was kneeling over him, straddling one of his legs while he ran his hands up and down the backs of her thighs. She was grateful, suddenly, that she had not put on pajama pants. 

“I want to show you how special you are,” she said. 

She tugged at the hem of his undershirt until he wriggled upright enough to peel it off. Then she shoved him back down against the mattress and tore off her own t-shirt. Jughead’s hands found her waist, nails scratching lightly at her back, and she smiled a little with pleasure before dropping down to kiss him. She could feel him hard against her leg. Experimentally, she pushed a little weight over to one side, increasing the friction. A sort of low, rumbling noise came from the back of Jughead’s throat, and he nipped at her lip, just a little too hard. 

An “ow” came out before she could stop it, and Jughead’s eyes flew open. 

“Shit,” he said at once. “ _Shit_.” 

Despite all the research she’d done on the mythology, despite what she knew about the metaphorical links between transformations and sexuality, she had somehow never put those pieces together, had not considered the possibility that the links might be literal after all, not... well, metaphorical. 

She sat up a little, but left a hand on his chest, let her fingers play softly across his collarbones. “Jug, _do_ you transform when you…” 

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” 

“You don’t _think_ so?” Betty asked, raising an eyebrow. 

He took a deep breath and released it, slowly. “I’ve never been with anyone, Betts,” he said, his voice soft with what she thought might be embarrassment. “But I don’t when I’m alone, no.” 

Betty thought about this for a moment. Much as she wanted to forget his mother even existed, that was the logical place for her mind to go right now: Jughead’s parents had obviously slept together, twice at a bare minimum, and his father was still very much alive. 

“Okay,” she said. Her mind flashed back over the several times they’d made out before, one of which was before she even knew he was a werewolf, and she’d seen no evidence to suggest that he might lose control—at least, not in any unusual ways. 

She took her own deep breath, smiled, and rearranged herself, laying on her side next to him. Jughead rolled halfway over, mirroring her, and she swung her top leg over his hip, urging him a little closer. 

“I trust you, Juggie,” she whispered, and this time he was the one whose smile was interrupted, first by one kiss and then another, and then another and another and another until she couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. Jughead’s fingers gripped her ribcage, and then his lips left hers and moved lower—down her neck, where he paused to concentrate on a spot that made her gasp, then down to her collarbone, where he paused again, taking a breath before nipping again—but lightly this time, so lightly it almost tickled, at which point Betty realized that though her body had mostly turned to goo, her legs were still very much solid, and her hips were pressing rhythmically against his. 

Her own hand had gone lower, slipping from his chest down to the elastic of his boxers. She inhaled sharply, and Jughead looked up. 

“I’m okay,” she said quickly. “Really good, in fact. Just—I wanted to show _you_ , remember?” Her fingers teased his waistband, played with the little trail of hair she’d found, and Jughead’s grip tightened. 

“Betty…” 

“And I’ve never been with anyone either, for the record,” she added, pulling herself free enough to knock him on his back again. 

She glanced at her hand, at the distorted plaid cotton next to it, and turned back to Jughead. 

“Off,” she ordered, and he quickly obliged.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They decided on breakfast at the diner, the one Betty was already starting to think of as _theirs_. The weather report was hinting at snow, so Betty bundled up a little, pulling a thick knit headband over her ears and tucking a scarf into her coat before they went out. She put on only one glove, though, and slipped her bare hand into Jughead’s, trusting he would keep it warm. 

Still, technically speaking, she had not _been with_ anyone. But as she looked at Jughead now, thought about where his wonderfully warm hands had been last night (and again this morning) and how they had made her feel, she smiled to herself, knowing the time would come sooner rather than later. 

“I’ll see them all a couple of days after Thanksgiving,” he said, glancing at the sky as they walked. Though it was daytime now, and the sky a wintery greyish-blue, she knew what he meant. “Betty, please, just—until I talk to my mom again—promise me you’ll stay safe?” 

_Don’t go out alone at night_ , she knew he meant. Certainly, she didn’t want to be eaten by a werewolf, but… was her safety really more important than the safety of all those girls she followed home? Deep in her heart, she knew it wasn’t. 

But there were only a few days left before Thanksgiving break, and she had so much schoolwork to get done before then. 

She nodded. “Okay.” 

Jughead’s shoulders dropped a couple of inches, and he wrapped his fingers more tightly around hers.

  
  
  
  
  
  


A few days later, she stood outside Thornhill Hall with her smallest suitcase and her backpack at her feet, waiting. Before too long, Archie’s familiar pickup rumbled to a halt in front of her. Jughead jumped out and quickly kissed her before grabbing her suitcase. 

“I can get that,” she protested, but he’d already thrown it in the bed of the truck. 

“Enjoy the perks of having a boyfriend with wild animalistic strength, Betts,” he said, and she grinned and swatted his shoulder. 

A few minutes later they were on the road, Betty squeezed into the middle seat, her legs slung mostly into Jughead’s lap so her knees wouldn’t hit the gear shift. His left arm rested on the back of the bench seat, and his fingers absently rubbed the back of her neck. 

The road back to Riverdale took them right past Jughead’s mother’s house, though this year, they wouldn’t be stopping to drop Jughead off. 

“Hey,” Archie said as they approached, “we should all wave at Jughead’s mom. Hi, Mrs. Jones!”

Archie lifted a hand from the steering wheel and gave an enthusiastic wave, but he was the only one who did. Betty stared resolutely out of the opposite window, and Jughead kept his eyes on the road ahead of them.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They approached Riverdale from the south, and dropped Jughead off at his dad’s trailer before heading north to Elm Street. 

“I’ll call you tonight,” Betty said. Jughead nodded, and kissed her one more time before closing the truck door. 

“Get a room,” Archie piped up from the driver’s seat. 

Jughead shot him a fake angry glare. “You know that wasn’t funny the first time, right, Arch?” 

“Dude, it’s funny every time.” Archie’s grin faded a bit as he looked at the dingy, mildewed trailer. “Say hi to your dad and Jellybean for me, okay?” 

Jughead nodded, gently shut the truck door, and headed inside. 

As they bumped over the railroad tracks that divided north from south, Archie cleared his throat. “I told you I’m really happy for you guys, right?” 

“Yeah, Archie. A few times now.” 

“Well, I am.” He fell silent for a moment, his brow furrowing in the way that Betty knew meant he was hard at work untangling thoughts. “I was kind of starting to worry about Jughead, like… it was starting to get weird that he never dated anyone.” 

“That’s not weird, Archie,” she said gently. “I never really did either, you know?” 

“No, that was different. You—I always assumed you just didn’t want to, or you hadn’t found anyone you liked enough. Jughead always acted like the idea of even trying was some huge cosmic impossibility.” 

Betty forced out a chuckle. “Well, you know he’s always been more dramatic than he likes to admit,” she said. 

“Yeah, I guess.” Archie fell silent for another moment. “He seems _good_ , now, though.” 

They pulled into Archie and Fred’s driveway, and Archie shut the truck off. From inside the house, Fred waved at them; they both waved back. 

“Archie, are you giving me the ‘if you break his heart, I’ll kill you’ speech?” 

“I won’t _kill_ you, Betty,” he said, as though he thought she imagined that he would, literally, try to kill her. 

She laughed as she hopped out of the truck. “See you tomorrow, probably.” A minute later, she was ringing her own doorbell. She had keys, of course, but they were somewhere near the bottom of her suitcase, and it was easier just to wait for her mom to answer. 

The front door swung open, but the person on the other side of the threshold was not Alice Cooper. 

“Betty,” said Polly— _Polly_ , who stood before her with a genuine, open smile, her hair soft and clean and all back to her natural honey blonde. She wore jeans, normal ones without any giant holes in them, and a dark gray sweater that immediately struck Betty as the exact midpoint between Southside black and Cooper pastel. Her nose was still pierced, but the ring had been replaced with a tiny, almost-pretty stud. 

Betty had not seen her sister in over a year, not since she had left for her freshman year of college. 

“Polly,” she said, stepping through the door and into a surprisingly welcoming hug. “You’re…home?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


(to be continued…)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear, you guys, I wrote that first scene _before_ 2x08 aired. 
> 
> As always, comments are much appreciated!


	10. Chapter 10

Nothing about Jughead’s father had changed - except, perhaps, for a few extra lines carved into his skin beneath the stubble of his beard. He still smelled like the burn of a gulp of whiskey, like cigarettes, like gasoline. Jughead was quite certain he recognized the shirt that FP was wearing as one that he’d pressed his face into as a small child; then, it had been worn into a wonderful kind of softness, but now it was much closer to threadbare. 

“Welcome home, kid,” F.P. said in his gruff way, the same as ever, thumping a hand against Jughead’s back. 

“Thanks,” he replied, though in truth, he’d stopped thinking of the run-down trailer as _home_ by the time Thanksgiving rolled around during his first year of college. The apartment he shared with Archie was the closest thing he’d had to home in many years, though even it, given Cheryl’s penchant for appearing there, did not feel entirely safe. 

“How’s your mom?” 

“Why should we care?” 

Jughead turned at the sound of his sister’s voice. The more his father stayed the same, the more Jellybean seemed to change. Now, at fourteen years old, she was leaning against the doorframe that marked the entrance to the small kitchen, her arms crossed over her chest, her eye makeup dark and smoky, a striking contrast to the last time he’d seen her, when her eyeliner had been a bright, neon blue. Jellybean was wearing a black t-shirt that said _THE FUTURE IS FEMALE_ and a flannel shirt tied around her waist, and while she had their mother’s face, the frown creased into her forehead and tugging at the corners of her lips was all F.P. 

“Hey,” he said to her. His body pitched toward hers slightly, automatically, but he didn’t take any steps right away, not with the expression she was wearing. The tension that had risen in their relationship when it became obvious that he was their mother’s favourite hadn’t bubbled up too often when he lived at home, given that he was essentially her caretaker, and that it was pretty obvious that Jellybean was _his_ favourite. But since he’d been gone, since he’d moved to the same town as Gladys - it’d all gotten so complicated. 

After a moment, though, Jellybean’s frown melted away, her bottom lip trembling ever so briefly. “Hi, Jug,” she said quietly, and closed the distance between them, throwing her arms around him in a hug. 

He squeezed her back, breathing a sigh of relief. “Hey, Jelly.” Over her shoulder, to F.P., he added, “Mom’s fine.” For just a second, Jellybean’s body tensed, but then she pressed her face into his shirt. 

“S’good,” F.P. murmured, rummaging around in the fridge. “S’good to hear.” 

Jellybean pulled out of the hug slowly and gave her eyes a tiny roll. Jughead couldn’t quite help his smile, and he gave the hem of her shirt a little tug. “I like this.” 

A slow smile started forming on her face, reflecting his. “Thanks.”

“Buy you a milkshake?” he proposed as the all-too-familiar sound of a cap being removed from a bottle of beer sounded from the other side of the kitchen. 

She nodded eagerly, and Jughead was just about to loop an arm around her shoulders and steer her out of the trailer when his phone started ringing. He pulled it out of his pocket and was surprised to see Archie’s name on the call display. 

“One sec,” he told his sister, and slipped out of the trailer by himself, pulling his jacket tight around his body but not bothering to do it up. “What’s up?” he answered. 

“Dude, breaking news,” Archie said, his voice hushed. “Polly Cooper is home.” 

“What?” Jughead asked, surprised by this information, which he hadn’t been expecting to hear, especially from Archie, of all people. The feud between Alice Cooper and her eldest daughter had been the topic of town gossip for months, but Betty had never really liked to talk about it. “How do you know?”

“I’m looking at her right now!” 

It took Jughead a second, but he put the pieces together quickly enough. “Are you staring into my girlfriend’s bedroom window?”

“Everyone’s clothed,” Archie said dismissively, as though that was the main concern. “They both look… sad. Or at least, really serious.”

“Huh,” Jughead said, for lack of any other response. 

“Did Betty tell you anything about this?”

“No,” he said slowly. “I’m not sure that she knew.” 

Archie made a contemplative sound. “Well. My dad said to tell you that there’s a spot at our table for you, for Thanksgiving dinner. There’s one for Betty, too, if things are getting crazy over there.” 

“Thanks, Arch,” Jughead said, nudging the toe of his boot into the gravel beneath his feet. “I’ll let her know.” 

“Things… good? At your place?” Archie asked tentatively. 

Jughead turned his face into a gust of wind that was picking up, letting it burn against his skin and sting his eyes. “JB and I are going to get milkshakes,” he said after a long moment of silence. 

“Cool,” Archie said, and there was a complete sort of understanding in that word, the understanding of a man who’d once been a boy who dragged a shy and solitary Jughead into games during recess, who’d seen Jughead’s big toes poking holes through his socks and wordlessly handed him a pair of his own. “Have a burger for me.”

 

 

 

“You and _Betty Cooper_?” Jellybean asked, so loudly that Pop Tate glanced up from where he stood behind the counter, something curious in the quirk of one of his brows. 

Jughead sunk down in his side of the booth. “Tell the whole town, JB,” he grumbled. 

Across from him, she grinned, unrepentant. “I didn’t know you had it in you, Jug.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Her eyes went wide. “Is that why you never dated anyone in high school? Because you were carrying a torch for Betty?” 

“ _No_ ,” he said firmly. “Do _not_ tell people that.” 

“It’s sweet,” she said. “A _little_ pathetic, but sweet.” 

“Jellybean - ”

“I’m _kidding_ , Jughead.” She kicked him under the table. “You don’t have to look so serious.” 

“It’s just - ” He shoved a fry into his mouth. “It’s new.” 

“Well, I’m happy for you,” Jellybean said decisively. 

“Thanks,” Jughead said, smiling slightly. He took a sip of his milkshake, set the glass down, and studied his sister for a moment. “Enough about me.” 

She glanced up at him, mouth still closed around the straw of her own milkshake. The glimmers of teasing disappeared slowly from her eyes as she sat up straight, toying with the edge of her napkin. “Everything’s fine here.” 

“Jellybean.” 

She sighed, shifting around on her side of the booth like she wanted to remove herself from the conversation. “Dad’s… Dad. He’s doing okay. Still working, some days.” She chewed her bottom lip and said, to her milkshake rather than to him, “If he’s having a bad day, I just spend the night somewhere else.” 

Jughead’s heart gave a terrible, heavy _thud_ before it seized up tightly. “Somewhere else?” he repeated. “Where?” 

Jellybean traced a finger through the condensation on her glass. “At my friend Toni’s. Or - I stayed with Polly a couple times.” 

“Fuck,” Jughead said. 

“It’s okay, Jug,” she said quickly. 

“Feeling like you can’t sleep in your own home is not _okay_ , Jelly,” he told her, his voice low, hushed. He pressed his fingertips into his forehead for a minute. “How long has this been going on?” 

“Just a few months.” 

“ _Just_ a few months,” he repeated, feeling as though he was teetering on the edge of hysteria. When he imagined her slipping out of the trailer, away from their father’s drunken ranting, away from a gathering of middle-aged men who wore their disappointments in the forms of serpentine tattoos and scars, he didn’t see her like this, with dark shadow around her eyes and a stubborn tilt to her chin - he saw his baby sister, her hair up in two black pigtails, her feet in converse sneakers with fraying shoelaces, the blue teddy bear he’d handed down to her tucked beneath one arm. He shook his head. “I never should have left you here.” 

Jellybean’s mouth turned down at one corner - only for a second or two, but long enough for Jughead to know that some part of her, however big or small, agreed. But then her mouth rearranged itself into the smallest, saddest smile, one that was made possible only by determination. “You had to go to college, Jug. _You_ had to go to college.” 

“You should go to college, too, Jelly. If you want to. You should be thinking about _that_ , or thinking about something totally different, not worrying about where you’re going to _sleep_ at night.” He closed his hand around his glass and tried to focus on the feeling of it, cool against his skin, which felt like it was overheating. He was beginning to feel like he was going to burst out of the confines of his being - not like he was going to change, but like he simply couldn’t handle it, this new, distressing piece of knowledge about his sister. He’d always seen himself as the cursed one, but Jellybean, two years younger than he’d been when his life had changed forever, was dealing with her own set of shitty circumstances. 

And she got no reprieve from the waning of the moon. 

“I’m old enough to be your legal guardian,” he said in a quiet, careful voice, like if he spoke softly enough, she wouldn’t realize what he was saying and put a stop to the conversation, just like she had last year. “We could get you emancipated from Dad. You could come live with me and - ”

“No.” It was sharp, decisive, and bitter, that word, and all hints of a smile had vanished from her face. “I’m not living in the same town as her.” 

“Jellybean,” he said gently, in his best attempt at a cajoling tone, but she cut him off again. 

“It’s _JB_ , Jug, I told you.” She smiled impishly, then, a clear end to the conversation. “As much as I’d _love_ to live with Archie and all his smelly sports gear, I’ve got to pass.” She slid along her side of the booth. “I’m going to the bathroom. Do not eat my onion rings.” She pointed a finger at him. “I counted them.” 

He watched her disappear down the small hallway that led to the washrooms, his stomach in a pretzel of a knot, the buzz of unused energy running through his limbs. In an attempt to ground himself, he took out his phone to text Betty, and found that he already had two messages from her. 

_My sister’s home_ , the first said, followed by, _It’s weird._

Jughead was about to reply when another text appeared: _Can I see you tonight?_

The knot in his stomach loosened a bit. _Definitely_ , he replied. _10?_

Betty expressed her agreement with a single smiley face, and he felt markedly better then, better enough to contemplate if stealing an onion ring was worth a scolding from his little sister. 

 

 

 

He drove his father’s truck down Elm Street at ten o’clock that night, and idled in front of the Coopers’ house as Betty had instructed. She emerged out of the front door only a few seconds later, her ponytail a bright spot beneath the porch light. The curtain in the living room window was drawn back, and he caught a glimpse of Alice Cooper’s frowning face.

“Drive,” Betty said the instant she was in the passenger seat, her door not even fully closed. “Please,” she added after a beat, but Jughead was already pulling away from the curb. 

“I take it you told your mother about me?” he asked, glancing over at her. 

“I did,” Betty said with a sigh, slouching into her seat, her eyes falling shut for a moment. “She’s not happy. But that’s not - ” She opened her eyes and turned toward him. “That’s not about you, Jug. She’d be angry no matter who I was dating. She told me that my curfew’s eleven.” She made a huffy sound. “I don’t _live_ there anymore, so I’m not exactly sure what she’s going to do if I break it.” 

Jughead drove for a couple blocks in silence, thinking of his own parent’s response when he’d left the house, which was loud snoring from the couch, upon which F.P. was passed out. The fundamentals of their lives were so different - a parent aggressively involved, a parent conspicuously absent - and yet in other ways, ways that no one else knew about, they had a lot in common. He wondered, sometimes, if the dating app’s questionnaire had picked up on their respective secrets when it paired them, or if its designers simply believed the old maxim that opposites attract. 

“So your mom’s the same, huh?” he asked wryly, once he’d pulled himself from his own thoughts. 

“Exactly the same,” Betty sighed. He chanced a glance over at her as he drove down yet another residential north side street and was struck by how _pretty_ she was, with the streetlights playing over her face, her eyes soft, and her lips pursed in thought. “How’s your family?” she asked quietly. 

“They’re the same, too.” He came to stop at a deserted intersection. “Where are we headed, Betts?” 

“Wherever,” she breathed, and it was a stupid thing to do, a dangerous one even in a speed-controlled zone, but he leaned over across the centre console just to kiss her cheek. 

 

 

 

He drove down to Sweetwater River and parked fairly close to the bank. It was cold enough that he would’ve liked to leave the car on and the heater running, but he couldn’t waste his father’s gas, so Betty crawled over the gearshift and into his lap to keep warm, her back against the window, her body curled against his. As she nestled in close, she made a quiet, sighing kind of sound that made his chest constrict, just for a second. 

“Would it be silly to say that I missed you today?” she murmured into his neck. 

Jughead rested his cheek against her forehead. “No. I missed you, too.” 

“Hm,” she murmured, and in that little syllable, not even a full word, he could hear her smile. 

On impulse, he lifted his hand and pointed to the right, out into the dark woods. “A couple miles that way,” he said. “That’s where I first… that’s where it happened the first time.”

Betty lifted her head and looked past his pointed finger, as though she was expecting the ghost of sixteen-year-old Jughead to appear. She turned her inquisitive eyes to his face after a moment, and her mouth took on a sympathetic shape. “What’s wrong, Juggie?” 

“Nothing,” he said automatically, but under the impressive arch of one of her brows, admitted, “My sister.” 

“Is she okay?” 

“Yeah. I mean… she says she is, and I think I believe her. I want to believe her. It’s just that our dad is… ” He trailed off, struggling to find the right words. It had almost been easier to tell her that he was a semi-supernatural being than it was to hash out the ugly details of his father’s alcoholism and misguided gang involvement. “I don’t know, Betts,” he finally said, embarrassed by the way his voice cracked over her name. “I don’t know if he’s worse, or if I’ve been away for long enough that I just don’t remember the worst of it.” 

“Jug,” she said softly. With the utmost gentleness, she tugged his beanie off and slipped her fingers into his hair, scratching soothingly at his scalp. 

“Jellybean said that she doesn’t sleep at home sometimes. I didn’t ask her why, I was - I was afraid to, I guess.” He looked into the sky and found the moon, fixing his eyes on it. “I mean, I don’t think he’s _hurting_ her, but he’s… doing whatever the hell he does with the Serpents these days, and probably getting wasted most nights, and she doesn’t want to sleep there. She doesn’t want to be in her own home. And I can’t convince her to leave - she hates my mother too much to come to Glenspire Falls.” He finally allowed himself to blink, and chanced looking into Betty’s face, stumbling over a confession: “She’s my kid sister, and I feel so fucking helpless. And - and guilty. She should have her mother. She should have a place she _wants_ to be.” 

“That’s not your fault, Juggie,” Betty murmured, her brow furrowed. “It’s not your fault that you’re like your mom and your sister’s not.”

He nodded, because he knew that, even if it didn’t change how he felt about it. “She’s got four more years here. That’s forever. It’s too long. And she doesn’t have - ” _a support system_ , he was going to say, but the thought gave him pause before he could get the words out. “She said she was staying with your sister, some nights. But if Polly’s home with your parents again, that won’t happen anymore.”

Realization flickered through Betty’s eyes. “Well, that explains her unrelenting determination to get my mother to agree to inviting your family over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“What?”

She nodded. “You’re all invited: you, your dad, Jellybean. I thought maybe she was just trying to get under Mom’s skin - you know, now her second daughter has a south side boyfriend. But it sounds like it has a lot more to do with Jellybean.” 

“ _Your_ mother wants to have _my_ family over for Thanksgiving?” 

Betty’s lips twitched up into a little smile. “ _Want_ is a strong word, but Polly wore her down.” She bit back that smile, anxiety surfacing in her green eyes. “Will you come?” 

It seemed to Jughead that there was probably no better way to ruin his relationship with Betty - so new, so good - than to jam their families into the same dining room on a holiday, but he couldn’t say no, not when the alternative was Chinese takeout from the somewhat sketchy place in Greendale, and not when he’d have to leave Jellybean soon and it seemed like Polly Cooper was the only adult in all of Riverdale who was looking out for her, and not when Betty was looking at him like that. 

“Of course,” he said, and Betty’s smile blossomed again, growing even wider. She leaned in to kiss him, and Jughead felt, acutely, how much he’d missed her in the short period of time they’d been apart, her easy way of listening, the warmth in her eyes when she looked at him, and the taste of her mouth. He reached between them and dragged the zipper of her coat downward until he could slip a hand inside. He cupped her breast, feeling the weight of it in his hand, and then kneaded a little with his fingers. When her only response was to kiss him harder, he slid his hand down, moved it beneath the hem of her shirt, and traced her abdominal muscles. 

“You’re so warm,” she breathed as his fingertips brushed against the cotton of her bra. She shifted around, a little awkwardly in the confined space of the truck, until she was straddling his lap, and she brought his other hand to her chest, too. 

They kissed and kissed, until Betty was grinding her hips down against his, and he was pushing his own hips up to meet her, desperate for more contact, and she said, “ _Jughead_ ,” in a quiet, needy voice and put her lips on his neck, sucking in a way that drew a growl from his throat and had him gripping her hips, pressing his whole body against hers - until he pushed her back against the steering wheel and the horn blared from the force of her body, startling them both. 

Betty looked at him, all red lips and heavily-lidded eyes, and Jughead did his very best to relocate his self-control. “We’re - we’re not… not here. Right?” 

“Right,” she said breathlessly. “I mean - you probably don’t have a condom.” 

“No,” he agreed, his heart hammering in his chest, though he was now sort of wishing he _was_ a guy who always had a condom in his wallet. 

“Okay,” she sighed. “So not… sex.” 

Impossibly, Jughead’s heart started beating even faster, and he slowly moved a hand beneath her shirt again, finding a nipple between his forefinger and thumb - he’d unclasped her bra several minutes before, and she’d performed that magic trick all girls seemed to have mastered and had managed to tug it out from beneath her shirt all of two seconds later. 

“What do you want, Betts?” he asked slowly, feeling like he’d give her absolutely anything. 

But she didn’t tell him what she wanted. Instead, she disappeared. 

“Betty?” he asked uncertainly, blinking at the apparent nothingness in front of him. He could still feel her breast under his hand, her knees on either side of his hips, but it surprised him when the zipper on his jeans began to move downward, seemingly of its own accord. “Betty,” he said again, and this time, it wasn’t a question. 

Hands he couldn’t see helped him out of his jeans and boxers as his own hands clutched invisible hips. Then, all of a sudden, Jughead felt his hands being lifted away from her, placed at his sides, and he sat where he was, breathing hard, until her small hand wrapped around him again - and then her _mouth_ \- 

“Oh my god,” he said, his hands scrambling along an unseen shoulder before his fingers found purchase in invisible locks of hair. “Oh my _god_.”

 

 

 

The next day, Jughead, his sister, and his father - who had griped a bit when Jughead communicated the invitation but had otherwise been surprisingly amenable to the idea of spending Thanksgiving with the Coopers - stood in front of the bright red door of a pretty house on Elm. Jughead had a bouquet of flowers in his hands, having been at a loss for what else to bring, even though Betty had said they only needed to bring themselves. 

Alice opened the door wearing an apron with an appropriately autumnal design; behind her, he spotted Betty, skidding to a stop like she’d been trying to beat her mother to the foyer. She offered him a tiny, apologetic smile, and then her eyes fell to the flowers in his hands, two spots of pink appearing high on her cheeks at the sight. 

“Jughead,” Alice said in crisp syllables, like his name was two separate addresses: one to a jug, one to a head. “Jellybean,” she added, her mouth thinning in a strange approximation of a smile when she saw the hole in the knee of his sister’s thin black tights. She lifted her gaze to his father, the smile disappearing altogether as her lips formed a straight line. “F.P.” 

“Happy Thanksgiving,” F.P. said with a wry sort of cheer, and nudged Jughead and his sister through the door, forcing Alice to take a step backward. 

“I brought - ” Jughead began awkwardly, holding the bouquet out slightly, and then, illustrating the reason that she was the main thing he was thankful for on that day, Betty swooped in to save him. 

“Flowers!” she chirped. “That’s so sweet.” She stepped forward to take them from him, pecking his cheek quickly. 

Hal stepped into the hall as Betty carried the flowers off to the kitchen. “Let me take your coats,” he said, going to the closet to retrieve some hangers as Alice continued to study Jughead’s family with slightly narrow eyes. 

“Mom, shouldn’t you check the turkey?” Polly’s voice prompted as she jogged down the stairs. She looked strikingly different than she had the last time Jughead had seen her, wearing a sweater in a shade of Cooper-approved pale purple and a pair of dark jeans that were free of rips or fraying hems. After blinking at her in surprise for a moment, however, he noticed a pair of little black skulls dangling from each of her ears, and a silver ring in a cartilage piercing. 

At the foot of the stairs, Polly came to an sudden stop, reaching out a hand to grip the bannister. Jughead was so caught up in how different she looked that it took him a moment to realize that _she_ was staring at _him_ , her eyes wide in her face in the exact same expression Betty wore when she was taken aback. 

Their staring contest was interrupted by Hal stepping between them as he reached out to take F.P.’s jacket, which Jughead’s father shoved in Hal’s direction with a little more force than necessary. By the time Hal moved toward the coat closet, Polly was smiling and approaching Jellybean, her arms extended as she said, “Happy Thanksgiving, J.” 

“Happy Thanksgiving,” Jellybean echoed, stepping into Polly’s hug without an ounce of hesitation. 

When they broke apart, Polly turned to him, smile still in place, and he decided to brush off the strangeness of the past few moments and made an effort to smile back. “Happy Thanksgiving, Jughead,” she said, and then turned to his father, “Mr. Jones.”

“F.P., Polly, please.” 

“I think Mr. Jones is more appropriate,” Alice said, reappearing in the doorway that lead into the living room, her apron now gone. “Dinner is ready,” she added, so they all made their way into the dining room. 

Dinner was enjoyable for several reasons: Jughead got to sit next to Betty, and almost immediately after they sat down, she pressed her knee against his and didn’t move it; the food was delicious, and Alice served him another helping of turkey while he was still internally agonizing over whether or not it would be appropriate to ask for more; around Polly, Jellybean was bright-eyed and talkative and relaxed, which eased some of Jughead’s anxiety about returning to school; and his father was not only on his best behaviour, but F.P. seemed interested in Betty, not only in a teasing look-who's-got-a-girlfriend way, but in a genuine, almost _parental_ way. When F.P. said, “Hope he’s treating you right, Betty,” and she politely replied, “You raised a gentleman, Mr. Jones,” Jughead very nearly blushed. 

After the main course, there was pie. Betty helped her mother serve dessert, and put extra whipped cream on top of his slice. He kept glancing over at her piece of pie, though, and the movement of her fork from that pie to her mouth, where her lips would close around the tines in a way that made him hungry for entirely different things. Watching Betty’s tongue flick out to lick a tiny piece of pumpkin filling from the corner of her mouth distracted him from the conversation going on at the other end of the table, where Alice was asking his father questions that were _almost_ , but not quite, needling. 

“I’ll do the dishes,” Betty volunteered when Jughead was sitting heavily in his chair, on the verge of a food coma. “Juggie, will you dry?” 

“’Course,” he muttered, straightening up reluctantly. He caught Jellybean’s gaze and saw that her eyes were filled with mirth; she mouthed _Juggie_ at him and waggled her eyebrows before tilting her head toward their father as if to say _I got this._

She did have it, he realized, as he looked at her. If F.P.’s moderately pleasant mood took a nosedive, she’d know what to do. That fact made Jughead feel simultaneously heartbroken and proud, which was a strange sensation to digest after all the food he’d just shovelled into his stomach. 

He stood up, with effort, and placed his hand very lightly on the small of Betty’s back, but before either of them could take a step toward the kitchen, Polly shot up out of her chair and blurted, “Betty, wait.” 

There was such intensity in her voice, such urgency, that everyone turned to stare at her. Her hands were pressed so firmly against the tabletop that the tips of her fingers were white.

Betty tilted her head. “What is it, Poll?” 

Polly realized, then, that they were all looking at her, and she glanced around; as her eyes lingered on him, Jughead dropped his hand from Betty’s back for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain. 

There was a tense beat of silence, and then Polly smiled, the same Stepford-esque smile Jughead had seen on Betty’s face many times before. “There are new dish towels,” she said, sitting back down slowly. “By the sink. In the bottom drawer.”

“Thanks,” Betty said, and then lead Jughead into the kitchen, dessert plates piled in her hands. She retrieved one of the towels from the bottom drawer and held it out to him; as he took it, he widened his eyes at her, a wordless comment: _that was weird._ She offered a small, tired shrug in response and whispered, “It’s weird that she’s home, period.” 

Jughead nodded. Before she could step over to the sink and start running the water, he said, “Hey… this was - it wasn’t that bad.” 

Betty smiled softly. “ _Nice_ , Jug,” she said. “The word you’re looking for is _nice_.” 

She turned away from him, and he flicked the towel at her ass, eliciting a quiet little giggle, and - yeah. It was nice.

 

 

 

 _Nice_ ended several hours later, when Jughead was stretched out on the trailer’s couch, nearly asleep, and his phone vibrated on the coffee table. 

He groped for it and picked it up, opening one eye to look at the screen. It was a text from Betty, so he forced his other eye open as well. 

_Outside_ , it said. _Invisible. Are you awake?_

He didn’t bother replying, just got up, shoved his feet into his shoes, tugged his coat on quickly, and pulled his beanie on and over his ears. He stepped out into the cool night and walked down the trailer’s rickety steps before he whispered, “Betty?” 

Her imperceptible hand landed on his forearm, and he just barely heard her voice above the wind. Her grip tightened with each word she spoke: “We have a situation.” 

 

 

 

(to be continued...)


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The rating's maybe going up a little?

There was a strange urgency in the soft knock at Betty’s bedroom door. 

“Yeah?” she called. She’d just changed into pajamas and made herself comfortable with a book after listening to her parents' long post-Thanksgiving analysis of the Jones family and all its troubles, and she was really hoping she wouldn’t have to get out of bed. 

The door creaked open, and Polly slipped into the room, two snifters filled with amber liquid pinched between the fingers of one hand. When she spoke, there was an equally strange urgency in her voice.

“We need to talk,” she said, as she closed the door with a gentle nudge of her foot. 

“Is that brandy?” 

Polly nodded, handed one glass to Betty, and joined her on the bed. “Mom had it out anyway, so I figured…” 

Without taking her eyes from her sister’s face, Betty reached around and put the brandy snifter on her bedside table. “Pol, what’s going on?” 

She watched Polly’s eyes shift from her to the door to the window to the door again, and finally back to her. She watched Polly take a deep breath and square her shoulders as much as possible for someone sitting cross-legged without the aid of lumbar support. 

“You and Jughead,” she said. “How long?” 

“Not very. A few weeks, maybe. Why?” 

Polly took another deep breath, one that seemed more resolute. “This is going to sound crazy,” she said. “But I need you to believe me. Okay?” 

In the eight years since Polly first enrolled at Riverdale High and undergone a total personality change, and in the six years since she had begun dating Sweet Pea and undergone a second total personality change, Betty could think of only a small handful of things Polly had said that _hadn’t_ sounded crazy. It was not difficult, therefore, to remain unflustered as she said “Okay.” She reached back for the snifter and took a tiny sip of brandy—it was there, she might as well—as she watched Polly gather herself up. 

“Your boyfriend is a werewolf,” Polly told her, and Betty almost choked.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jughead choked too, though he wasn’t drinking anything. 

“Polly said _what_?” He fumbled around for her invisible hand, a look of sheer panic in his eyes, and Betty felt a pang pierce straight through her heart at the contrast between this and the way he’d clutched at her invisible self only yesterday, in his father’s truck, when she had... 

But that was yesterday. She slid her hand into Jughead’s, lacing their fingers together. “She knows, Jug.” 

“How?” He whipped his head around, wildly, as though he expected Polly to appear out of nowhere—or, perhaps, for Polly _not_ to appear. 

“She’s not here,” Betty said quickly. “I made sure she wasn’t following me.”

Jughead shot her an extremely skeptical look, and even managed to aim it mostly at her face. 

“Polly doesn’t have any abilities,” she added. “I’m sure of it. When I discovered mine… I mean, I did everything I could to figure out if she could do the same thing. She can’t. She’s normal, Juggie.” Something Polly had said later in their conversation tugged at a thread in her mind, but she forced herself to let whatever that was go for now. 

“Then how the hell does she know?” 

“Easy there,” Betty murmured, expanding her fingers against his grip; if Jughead squeezed any harder, she was going to pop back into view, and there might be neighbors watching. Her half-walk, half-jog to the south side had kept her warm, but now that she’d stopped moving, the cold was starting to bother her. “Is there somewhere private around here we can talk?” 

Jughead shook his head. “On the south side? I’m pretty sure all the buildings are condemned. Unless you want to hit up the biker bar. Although it might not be too private, since everyone knows who my dad is.” 

Betty felt her eyes widen; as usual, it took a moment for her to realize Jughead couldn’t see her expression and she’d need to make herself speak. “Oh, god, no,” she told him. “That’s the last place in the world you should go.” 

“I’ll grab my dad’s truck keys, I guess,” he said. “We’ll just drive somewhere.” 

Once they were on the road, she turned herself visible again; once they were parked on the banks of Sweetwater River again— _not_ , Betty noticed, at the spot where they’d parked the day before—she started to tell Jughead everything Polly had told her.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Do you remember when I started dating Sweet Pea?” Polly said, her brows arching eagerly towards Betty, whose brain reeled slightly at the total lack of segue from _Your boyfriend is a werewolf._

“Of course I do. It was right after you turned sixteen.” Hell, she thought, Fred Andrews probably had a pretty clear memory of when Polly started dating Sweet Pea. The fights had certainly been loud enough, even before Sweet Pea had attempted to cross the Cooper threshold in his leather Serpents jacket. 

“He didn’t ask me out because he liked me,” Polly said. “Of course, we did eventually fall in love. But when we first got together, we only said we were dating so I’d have an excuse for running off with him all the time. What he was really doing…” She shook her head. “It’s weird telling you this.” 

She took a tiny sip of brandy, and Betty did the same, in the hopes that mimicking Polly’s body language would keep her talking. 

“What he was really doing was recruiting me.” 

“Recruiting you? For what?” 

“Werewolf hunting,” Polly replied, as though this was an entirely normal thing to recruit sixteen-year-old cheerleaders to do. 

“Polly.” Betty tried her hardest to keep her voice slow and measured. “Polly, werewolves don’t exist.” 

“They do,” she said. “There used to be packs of them around here, roaming the woods. That’s why Fox Forest is called Fox Forest.” 

“That’s why _what_?” Betty asked, shaking her head a little. Alcohol, she decided, was not going to help this situation at all; she put her brandy snifter on her bedside table, as deliberately as possible, using the precious seconds to try and collect herself. 

“To distract people from the fact that there are werewolves in it!” Polly’s eyes widened to an almost absurd degree. She leaned forward and put her free hand on Betty’s knee. “Or were, I mean. There were. It’s perfectly safe there now.” 

Fox Forest was _not_ perfectly safe now, in Betty’s opinion; she’d heard far too much from Kevin about what went on there after dark to ever believe the whole forest was perfectly safe. But that was hardly the point. 

“You’re telling me,” Betty said, “that you and your boyfriend—”

“Ex-boyfriend,” Polly cut in. “And not me. I never had what it took to be a hunter. The Serpents recruited me because they thought I had potential, but…” She shrugged. “I didn’t, in the end. And that was fine. Sweet Pea tried to take me hunting a few times—regular hunting, I mean—and I couldn’t even kill a deer.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It was at this point in her story that Jughead jerked so hard his head almost hit the truck’s roof. “The Serpents are _werewolf hunters_?” 

“Not all of them, according to Polly,” she said quickly. “Your dad isn’t. He has no idea. But part of the gang is a splinter cell. Or maybe it’s the other way around—like the motorcycle gang part is a cover for the werewolf hunting part. Except there aren’t any werewolves around anymore.” 

“Except me.” Jughead’s voice was, understandably, morose. His mouth opened slightly, but instead of speaking again, he reached up a hand to pull his beanie over his face and then slumped against the driver’s side window, utterly defeated. 

Betty gently placed a hand on her boyfriend’s knee. “They don’t know about you,” she said. “They talk about a so-called Last She-Wolf of Riverdale, but Polly had no idea it was your mom until she saw you, and put the pieces together. I don’t know what your mom did to keep them from finding out, but whatever it was, it worked. She protected you, Juggie.” 

“No, she fucking didn’t,” he snapped, bolting upright; he ripped the hat from his face to reveal his eyes blazing with an almost unnatural fury. “She _left me here_. She left me here alone with them.” 

“She came back,” Betty pointed out, though doing so felt futile. 

“Sure. And then she left me here again without bothering to mention there were hunters in the area! ‘Sorry you have to go through this once a month, Jughead. I’ll make it a little easier by not telling you that there’s a whole group of people who would want to kill you if they knew what you were. They’re all friends of your father’s, by the way.’ Real protective. Mother of the century, right there.” 

“Jug…” she said, but he was already reaching for the door handle, already scrambling out of the truck, already slamming the door and stalking into the woods. It was as angry as Betty had ever seen him. _Maybe your mother believed all the hunters were gone_ , she thought. Or maybe she was simply more inclined to notice Gladys’s protective instincts, considering that Gladys had more or less threatened to kill her to protect him. 

She climbed out of the truck too, after shoving both the keys Jughead had left in the ignition and the hat he’d left on the bench seat into her coat pockets. Only when she had disappeared into the trees herself did it occur to her that it might be a bad idea to follow him, that Jughead might very well not be himself right now. 

No, though. Even if he had transformed, even if he was a wolf, he was still _Jughead_. 

Anyway, she told herself, he would have either stripped off or burst out of his clothes if he’d transformed, and she hadn’t encountered any discarded flannel or ripped denim yet. 

She huffed and puffed her way through the frigid forest until she finally came upon him. He was seated on a large rock by the river’s edge, knees drawn into his chest, fully dressed and staring up at the cloudless sky. The moon was close to full—would be full on Tuesday, she knew—and there was something ethereal in the way its light shone on him, something strangely beautiful in how its beams played across his face. Jughead was beautiful, she thought, full-stop. That now-familiar heat started building low in her abdomen; she willed it to go away until a more convenient moment. 

He did not turn to look at her—perhaps he imagined she’d be invisible anyway, though she wasn’t—but she knew he could sense exactly where she was. 

“I thought you might have changed,” she said, as she approached his rock. 

“It was tempting.” His eyes remained fixed on the moon. “Still is. I won’t when you’re around, though.” 

“I know.” There wasn’t much room left on the rock, but she scooted herself onto it anyway so that her left shoulder angled slightly into his right. “Here,” she added. 

Jughead took the proffered hat, but didn’t put it on. He did, finally, look at her. “How did Polly know about me?” he asked. “How could she tell?” 

“I’m not exactly sure. All she said was that she knew how to read the signs.” 

“There are signs,” Jughead said, bitterly. “Why did no one ever tell me there were _signs_?” 

“I don’t know, Jug.” He’d moved the hat into his left hand; she twisted now so she could take his right, noticing as she did so that his knuckles were scraped and raw. “Did you punch something?” 

“Just a tree,” he sighed. “It’ll live.” 

She lifted his hand to chest level and pressed her lips softly between two scrapes. Beside her, Jughead took a deep breath that seemed only to increase his tension. 

“So what did you say to Polly, anyway?” 

“What do you think I said?” Betty replied, almost chuckling at the question. “I told her that her story was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard, that there were no such things as werewolves, and she sounded like a crazy person. And even if werewolves did exist, which they don’t, I think I’d know if I was dating one.” 

He nodded twice. “And?” 

“And then she made this weird, kind of sad face and said ‘It took me a long time to believe it, too.’” She paused for a moment, replaying the next bit of their conversation in her mind before she spoke. “So then I asked what she was going to do next, like was she going to call Sweet Pea and send him over to your dad’s place with a silver knife or whatever? And she said no, of course not, she wouldn’t do that to J.B., and anyway, the full moon isn’t until Tuesday. I couldn’t tell whether she knew you can transform at will. It kind of seemed like she might not have known _everything_ , since she was never a hunter herself.” Betty huffed out a frosty breath, then added, “We’re only here until Sunday morning. That’s not even three days. You lay low, and I’ll… keep an eye on Polly, I guess. See if I can get any more information out of her.” 

Jughead was silent for a good long while. He flexed his fingers back and forth between hers; they were long enough that his fingertips pressed into the rough patches on her palms. “Let’s go back,” he said, after a few minutes. “You’re freezing.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He drove her only as far as the end of Elm Street, where the streetlight was out; neither of them wanted anyone in her family—or Archie or Fred, for that matter—to notice the truck. Jughead put the truck in park and turned to her, a layer of anguish still laid over his features. 

“Don’t worry about me and my mother’s stupid attempts at imposing curfew,” she said, trying to lighten the mood a little. “I’m really good at sneaking in and out.” 

“My mom’s right, you know.” He put a hand on her knee and regarded it there for a moment, scraped knuckles barely evident in this dim light, before looking up at her. “It makes no sense that you would want any of this.” 

The same thick, hot outrage she’d felt while confronting Gladys bubbled up inside her again. 

“I don’t want _this_ , Juggie,” she said softly, moving her hands to cup his face. “I want _you_. And if having you means dealing with all the other stuff, well… then I’ll deal with it.” 

The thought that Jughead might ask why started to run through her mind, but it didn’t get very far before he kissed her so hard that she very nearly disappeared.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The next day was a strange affair. She and Jughead had agreed it would be best not to see each other, an easy enough thing to arrange thanks to the Cooper family tradition of ignoring Black Friday sales in favor of getting the weekend edition of the _Register_ out. This was the first time in six years that Polly had joined them; Betty thought the whole situation would have felt awkward enough even without the knowledge that Polly’s ex-boyfriend’s mission in life was to exterminate her current boyfriend. 

(She tried not to think about the fact that with one phone call, one text message, Polly could tell the Serpents exactly where both the Last She-Wolf of Riverdale _and_ her son were currently living.) 

Mostly, thank goodness, they were able to work in silence. All Betty really wanted to do was lock herself in the basement, where they kept all the back issues, and see if she could find anything at all suspicious from the years Gladys Jones’s pack had roamed Fox Forest. But her family would notice if she disappeared, and so here she was, stuck on the worst and slowest of the computers while she scanned the Arts & Lifestyle section for layout mistakes. 

“Polly’s been helping us a lot lately. She hasn’t lost any of her proofreading skills,” their father announced proudly, and Polly beamed at him in a sickeningly sweet way that made Betty’s stomach churn. 

“Did you mention your plans to Betty?” Alice asked from the corner. “Polly’s finally begun thinking about a real future.” 

“Oh?” Betty said, as politely as she could manage. 

Polly nodded. “I’m starting at the community college next semester, and then hopefully I can transfer somewhere better in the fall.” 

“We’re still discussing the suitability of these future plans,” Alice said, putting just enough emphasis on _suitability_ for Betty to understand that although Polly’s future plans finally existed, and apparently involved a college degree, they were not, in fact, suitable. 

“Social work is a respected field,” Polly said calmly. “You’re just upset because it doesn’t pay very well.”

“No, we’re upset because we thought you had finally decided to leave the south side behind.” Alice’s lips pursed momentarily. “Social work is a noble profession, I’m sure, but the kinds of people—”

“That’s exactly the point, Mom,” Polly said, rolling her eyes. “I lived there long enough that people know me. They know I understand the south side. They’d trust me more than they’d trust some random person with a bunch of degrees coming down there to try and fix things. I could make a difference, a real one.” She turned to Betty, who was unable to divert her attention before Polly caught her gaze. “Betty understands that. Don’t you, Betty?” 

Betty understood completely. For a brief, wonderful moment, she felt nothing but warmth towards her older sister and her desire to make a difference, nothing but compassion for how strange and difficult Polly’s life must have been for the past six years. 

Then she remembered Polly’s life had been strange and difficult because she’d been in training to make a difference as a werewolf hunter. 

“That’s a tough career, Pol. They do say it’s rewarding, though.” It was a neutral statement, and she tried to keep her voice neutral as she gave it. 

“Polly’s going to explore all her options over the next few months,” Alice said, as though Betty hadn’t spoken at all. “We thought she could visit you one weekend. Get a feel for the campus and the environment.” 

This time, Alice put no particular emphasis on any word, which Betty knew meant that the whole visit had been decided upon long ago, and any thoughts she might have about it would be deemed completely irrelevant. 

“I’m sorry, _what_?” she said, and was unsurprised when both her parents informed her she had no choice in the matter. “No. Absolutely not. I won’t have time before the end of the semester. You don’t want my grades to slip, do you?”

“You’ll make time,” said Hal mildly. “If you can make time for a boyfriend, you’ll make time for your sister.” 

Polly smiled at her from across the room, and Betty felt the world’s worst headache coming on.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After a long day at the _Register_ and a dinner of leftover turkey that somehow seemed even longer, Betty excused herself to her bedroom, where she sat in her window seat and stared at the world outside. There were no lights on next door; she knew Archie and Fred had gone to the annual Riverdale High—Greendale High football game. Over the Andrews house, the sky stretched dark and clear. She could not see the moon from here. 

She reached for her phone and called Jughead, but he didn’t pick up. A few minutes later, she received a text from him instead. _Sorry. I’d never be able to hear you where I am_ , followed quickly by _You’ll never believe where I am._

She was about to ask where he was when a picture came through, a badly framed, slightly blurry shot of Jughead, J.B., and Archie together in the Greendale High bleachers that she knew Fred must have taken for them. She smiled a little at the contrast between Archie’s cheerful grin and the near-identical, bored-out-of-our-minds expression that Jughead and his little sister shared. That J.B. was biting into a giant pretzel only compounded the similarities between them. 

_Wow_ , she wrote back. Getting Jughead to attend Riverdale High football games had been challenging enough when they’d actually been in high school; if Archie hadn’t been the quarterback, he never would have gone. She knew that because Jughead had told her so, every single home game, as they sat together on the sidelines pretending he wasn’t eating ninety percent of their supposedly shared snacks. _You’re right, I wouldn’t have believed it._

 _Figured there was safety in numbers,_ Jughead replied. She winced, but knew he was right; as little as she knew about werewolf hunters, she felt sure they wouldn’t attack in such a public setting. 

_So I guess I won’t be sneaking over to the trailer to see you._

There was somewhere else she could sneak, though. Somewhere she might be able to learn a little more about these supposed hunters. 

_Damn it_ , Jughead wrote back. _I knew I hated football._

  
  
  
  
  
  


Less than an hour later, she was slipping through the back door of the Whyte Wyrm. Since she’d walked to the south side, she had opted for comfort and warmth in her clothing selection. She hoped, now that she saw the inside of the place, that she wouldn’t have to make herself visible while she was here. In her gray sweater, pink coat, and ponytail, she would stick out worse than twenty sore thumbs. There was a stripper pole, for god’s sake, and though she hadn’t frequented many bars on account of not being twenty-one yet, Betty was sure those were not standard features in nicer establishments. 

Though he was dressed exactly like everyone else in the bar, Sweet Pea stuck out too; he was too tall to blend in, and therefore easy to find. He stood between a pool table and some ancient arcade games, surrounded by fellow Serpents and laughing uproariously at god only knew what. Jughead’s father hung on the outskirts of the group, but close enough to hear them. If Polly was right and the hunters kept their particular business from the other Serpents, then she wasn’t going to find out anything directly from Sweet Pea right now. 

She wondered if there was any possible way she could goad someone into asking whether he had heard from Polly lately, but couldn't think of one. A glance around the bar revealed very little useful information. Old arcade games and endless, somehow-faded neon, check. Bored-looking, pink-haired, female bartender who seemed to be about her age, check. 

At the back of the bar was a flight of stairs, and Betty made her way up them; she could already see two doors at the top of the landing. One was ajar, and looked to be a manager’s office. Several large biker types were perched on and around an old desk, clutching beers, and she decided to try the closed door first. 

The closed door was locked, but no match for the bobby pin and small metal file she’d stowed in her purse. 

She closed the door behind her, locked the deadbolt, and flicked on the light. 

“Bingo,” she murmured. Then her eyes swept over the back wall, and she nearly threw up. Hanging right in the middle, proudly mounted on a dark wooden shield, was a large stuffed wolf head. 

She made herself walk over to examine it more closely. _It could just be a regular wolf_ , she told herself. _It could be. It could just be a regular wolf._ She suspected, though, that it was not. Its fur seemed much darker than the fur of most wolves. Cheryl Blossom had been larger than average, when she transformed, and this wolf was even larger. Now it stared blankly across the room, yellow glass eyes pointing in slightly different directions, lips fixed into a permanent, horrible snarl. 

As she studied the wolf’s head, Betty found it only too easy to imagine an old gray beanie slung casually over its ears. 

Suddenly, her breathing came fast and irregular. She needed to sit down—no, she needed to _get out_ , to run away from this place, to find Jughead and take him somewhere far, far, away from Riverdale, never to return—

But no. She knew they would always have to come back; their families were here. She could never truly abandon her parents, and Jughead could never truly leave J.B. 

She took a deep, shaky breath, got to her feet, and began searching the rest of the room.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Jughead stood outside the trailer door in his pajamas and coat again. “This is getting to be a habit, Betts,” he said quietly, turning his head in the direction of her approaching, invisible footsteps, and then, “Oof,” as she flung herself at him and squeezed as hard as possible. “Is everything okay?” 

She couldn’t speak. 

“Come inside? J.B. won’t hear anything. She’s ‘decompressing’ from the trauma of high school football, which means headphones. And my dad…” He glanced at the empty parking spot in front of the trailer. “I don’t know where he is.” 

“He’s at the Whyte Wyrm,” Betty said. 

Jughead sighed. “Jesus, Betty. Were you there? Snooping?” 

She waited until they were inside the trailer and seated on the old couch before turning herself visible again. 

“I don’t think I like this,” he said, and that was before she’d even gotten out her cell phone to show him the pictures. “What were you thinking, going there alone? The Serpents are dangerous, even the ones who aren’t… you know.” 

“Jughead.” She tried to keep her voice calm. “I’m not the one in danger.” 

“Just because no one can see you—”

“I do stuff like this all the time,” she protested, only realizing once the words were leaving her mouth that she had never actually told him so. “Well, not exactly like this, but—well, I have the ability, so I should use it for good, right?” 

Jughead merely looked confused. 

“I follow girls home at night to make sure they stay safe,” she said through a rush of impatience. This wasn’t the point. “I’ve been doing it for years. I followed Cheryl, remember? But, look—”

“God, Betty,” he muttered. “You could—”

“Up until a month ago,” she said flatly, “I had no reason to think anyone could smell me out. Okay? Now I know that, like, five people can sense me when I’m invisible. That’s a really low percentage. And even you didn’t realize what was going on, the first time, so I think I’m safe. I’m not stopping, by the way,” she added quickly.

“Betty—” 

“The point is,” she continued, talking over him, “Polly was right about Sweet Pea.” 

Together, they looked over the photos on her phone. She had carefully framed her shots so that the taxidermy wolf head was omitted, but she hadn’t held back on the rest of what she’d found: the solid silver switchblades, the revolvers loaded with silver bullets, the jars upon jars of dried wolf’s bane. The framed picture of a younger Sweet Pea standing proudly next to a much smaller, fine-boned blond man she didn’t recognize, a wolf carcass slumped at their feet. A second framed picture of the blond man on his own, grinning wickedly at the camera with sunken eyes. That photo was of a fallen comrade, she supposed; it had _R.I.P. Charles “Chic” Smith—brother, Serpent, hunter_ inscribed across the glass in silver Sharpie marker.

Jughead shuddered a few times, but held himself together otherwise. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Great weekend, huh, guys?” Archie said cheerfully, as they pulled away from Riverdale on Sunday morning. 

“I’ve had better,” Jughead muttered. He didn’t look great; the bags under his eyes were darker than normal, and his skin was a little bit gray. Some of that, she knew, was due to the upcoming full moon. But he also definitely looked like he hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since they’d left Glenspire Falls. 

She hadn’t slept well since then, either. 

“It was weird,” Betty said. 

“Because Polly’s back?” Archie asked. “I meant to come over and say hi to her. My dad and I just got super involved in some stuff. How is Polly?” 

“She’s… okay. She’s got plans for the future now, I guess.” Community college and social work were safe enough things to discuss, community college and social work and helping out with the _Register_. 

“I wonder what made her decide to finally break up with Sweet Pea and come back to your parents,” Archie mused, and Betty realized that in all the chaos of trying to figure out whether or not Polly was going to try and have her boyfriend slaughtered, she’d completely forgotten to ask. 

With every mile they put between themselves and Riverdale, Jughead’s mood seemed to lighten. By the time they passed the first highway sign for Glenspire Falls, he was almost smiling.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Home sweet home,” Jughead said a few hours later, as he unlocked the door to the boys’ apartment. Archie had offered to drop Betty off at her dorm, but it was an offer he seemed to anticipate she would decline. Archie himself had declined to come inside; he was already speeding over to Veronica’s, where, he’d informed them with a knowing little smile, he would be spending the night. 

Betty abandoned her suitcase by the door, removed her coat and boots, and headed for the bathroom. She expected to find Jughead in the kitchen when she emerged—they hadn’t eaten lunch yet—but as she walked past his bedroom door, the movement of well-worn plaid flannel caught her eye. He was sitting on the edge of his bed and unpacking something from his messenger bag, or rather, two small somethings, one small box and one small bottle that were going into the drawer of his nightstand. 

“What’s that?” she asked, although the pilot light that now lived low in her belly had already ignited. 

“I, um. I may have picked up some supplies at the drugstore this weekend.” She could tell he was trying to play it cool; he was failing completely, which she decided at once was very endearing. 

“Oh, yeah?” Betty closed the bedroom door behind her, bolted it shut, and climbed into Jughead’s lap, kneeling so that she was straddling his hips. “What kind of supplies?” 

“The kind we didn’t have in the truck.” 

His hands found either side of her waist. One finger dipped below the waistband of her jeans, joined by another one seconds later. Just before he kissed her, Betty threaded her hands through his hair and knocked his beanie to the floor. Soon the beanie had been joined by all the rest of their clothing, the very last item—her panties—landing noiselessly on top of the pile. She was on her back now, clutching along the muscles of his back, as Jughead worked down her with his mouth, exercising his knack for finding every single pulse point her body had to offer. He kissed roughly down her neck and across one collarbone, then between her breasts and over her heart, any traces of hesitation gone. 

She tried to reach for that one particular part of him, but he put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her back against the mattress—gently enough, but the meaning was clear. “No,” was all he said. 

And then his impossibly warm mouth was on her nipple, and all she could say was “ _Yes_.” 

By the time he’d kissed down her stomach, she felt ready to explode; then his tongue swiped over her, and she very nearly did. 

“Okay,” she gasped, trying to sit up a little. “I’m ready.” 

Jughead paused for a moment, regarding her, and then pushed her down again. “No,” he said, “you’re not.” He got back to work, one hand clutching at her hip for balance, and _god_ , it seemed impossible that anything should feel so good, that _she_ should feel so good, that—

Her whole body pushed against the finger he'd crooked inside her, and after that, she found herself quite content not to move for a while. It wasn’t the first time Jughead had gotten her off, or even the first time he’d gone down on her, but it all felt _different_ , somehow. Better. 

And that was just the warmup. 

“Now I’m ready,” she said, nearly phrasing it as a question. “Are you?” Jughead nodded, and reached for the drawer. 

The condom went on easily; the lube they both looked at for a moment. 

“I’m not sure I need that,” Betty said. 

Jughead shrugged one shoulder and squeezed a bit onto his fingers anyway. She braced herself as he reached for her, expecting it to be as cold as it inevitably was when she used it on her own, but— 

“Have I told you how much I like how warm you always are?” she asked, reaching to pull him in for a kiss before they started. His fingers were still working gently at her, building her back up, and she longed for _more_ , or at least for the ability to touch _him_. She hadn’t helped at all so far, although from what she could see, he wasn’t in any need of her help. 

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned it.” Jughead got himself into position, then looked down at himself and back up at her. “Is this going to hurt you?” 

“I hope not,” she said, and then, “I don’t think so. It’s not—I mean, I haven’t with a person, but I do have, you know. Toys.” 

“Right.” 

She felt a little bit of fumbling and poking, so she reached down to guide him to exactly the right spot. There was an electric sort of jolt as he suddenly found the right angle, and then—

“Oh, my god,” Betty breathed, closing her eyes. 

“Okay?” 

She felt everything. _Everything_ , all at once, and that was before he started to move. “Amazing,” she moaned, once he did; if she hadn’t trained herself never to use the word, she would have described the sensation as perfect. “That feels amazing.” 

“Betty Cooper,” Jughead said in that low near-growl; she was just sensible enough to expect his next words to be along the lines of _you’re so beautiful_ , which was a thing she’d always imagined people said in this situation. Instead, she heard “Don’t you _dare_ disappear on me now.” 

Her eyes flew open, and she lifted a hand just far enough to see that it was opaque. “Am I? Disappearing?” 

“You flickered,” he said. “Please, just—”

Betty pushed her hips up, sending him deeper inside of her, and nipped just below his ear. “Make me,” she whispered, and just before she closed her eyes again, she saw a delighted gleam in Jughead’s eye. 

He pressed a thumb just under her collarbone, hard, and nipped back.

  
  
  
  
  
  


(to be continued...)

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I hope this answered at least a few of the "WHAT IS UP WITH POLLY?!" questions from last chapter. (I realize that new questions may have been raised.)
> 
> As always, thanks for reading, and please leave us some love/your thoughts when you can!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * A [Restricted Work] by [redcirce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redcirce/pseuds/redcirce) Log in to view. 




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